News

TimesTen Targets the RTE

• By John K. Waters
• June 22, 2004

Few industry buzzwords have maintained the kind of traction we have seen from the Real-Time Enterprise (RTE). The ideal of a system that allows managers to get information about their companies in real time for faster decision-making, improved performance management, and quicker reactions to change has captured the imagination of managers everywhere. RTE is an ideal that is fast becoming a competitive requirement.

“Intense competition is forcing companies to improve the responsiveness and relevance of their customer interactions, as well as streamline operations to take out costs,” Jim Groff, CEO of TimesTen told eADT. “As companies strive to real-time enable business-critical functions, we are seeing a dramatic increase in infrastructures architected to marry a real-time data management function at the application tier with historical data sources and messaging middleware to create a strong foundation for a real-time enterprise.”

Real-time systems are characterized by very rapid response requirements; applications that involve systems talking to systems -- so sub-second response is important; peak-load transaction rates that are in the thousands or tens of thousands of transactions, events, or operations per second; and applications that have a high requirement for continuous availability.

TimesTen is a Mountain View, Calif.-based infrastructure software company whose products are used by IT and engineering organizations to build real-time applications. To date, TimesTen has been known primarily among providers of large-scale carrier applications and global securities trading systems. But the company has been moving fairly aggressively from its roots in networks and telecom into the expanding RTE space. Last week the company launched three new real-time infrastructure software packages designed specifically for enterprise customers.

The TimesTen expanded product line now includes:

• The TimesTen/Transact real-time transaction processing system, which provides an infrastructure for building very high-speed transactional applications, such as those used in securities trading, telecom billing, and online commerce. 
  
• The TimesTen/Cache, a real-time caching system designed for applications requiring faster access to subsets of information stored in back-office RDBMSs.
   
• The TimesTen/DataServer, a real-time distributed database system that provides a memory-optimized data management and data replication foundation for network or application-tier deployment.

All three products are based on the latest version of the company’s core offering, the TimesTen 5.1 in-memory database. “The secret sauce underneath what we do is a memory-centric, in-memory architecture that allows us to get very high rates of performance -- tens of thousands of updates per second, hundreds of thousands of queries per second -- in support of these applications,” Groff explained.

The three new TimesTen products are currently offered on a limited availability basis. According to the company, they will be generally available in the third quarter of 2004.