Azul, a company focused on Java platforms, and ActiveViam, a provider of high-performance analytics for financial services, have announced a partnership to optimize cloud costs for financial analytics. The collaboration combines Azul’s Platform Prime, its high-performance Java platform, with ActiveViam’s Atoti platform to deliver faster, more elastic in-memory analytics for financial organizations.
Financial institutions currently face challenges in delivering real-time risk analytics amidst volatile markets, while also managing infrastructure costs and adhering to strict regulatory requirements for uptime, resiliency, and compliance. The migration of data-intensive applications to the cloud, while addressing some of these demands, has also led to increased cloud expenditure, making cost optimization a priority at the board level.
The new solution integrates Azul Platform Prime with ActiveViam’s Atoti platform to manage terabytes of in-memory analytical data. This combined offering is designed to dynamically scale with demand, allowing financial institutions to rapidly expand and contract their analytical data capacity. A key feature leveraged is Azul Platform Prime’s support for CRaC (Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint) functionality.
CRaC is engineered to significantly reduce the startup and warm-up times of Java applications. By utilizing CRaC, Atoti users can create a ‘checkpoint’ or snapshot of a fully initialized JVM instance and application state. This saved state can then be used to launch new JVMs almost instantaneously, dramatically cutting down on Java cold start and warm-up periods. This capability is projected to reduce cloud infrastructure costs by up to 50%.
An example of this implementation involves a large global financial services group that utilized Atoti, combined with Platform Prime’s CRaC support, to address slow startup times for a large, in-memory credit risk application deployed on AWS Graviton. The customer was able to provision in-memory Atoti instances in minutes, rather than hours, enhancing application elasticity, improving reliability, and reducing cloud costs.
Antoine Chambille, Chief Technology Officer at ActiveViam, stated that through continuous innovation and collaboration with Azul, Atoti has become a cost-effective platform for complex financial analytics. He added that the combined efforts of the two companies have unlocked a new method to reduce total cost of ownership while maintaining high performance and improving availability.
Gil Tene, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Azul, remarked that the integration of ActiveViam’s Atoti in-memory analytics with Azul Platform Prime has already demonstrated its capability to deliver insights on terabytes of data rapidly and without errors. He noted that leveraging CRaC support in Azul Platform Prime allows organizations to deploy new Atoti cubes in a fraction of the previously required time, accelerating time-to-insight and substantially reducing infrastructure costs.
Azul, based in Sunnyvale, California, provides Java platforms for cloud enterprises and is solely focused on Java. Its customers include 36% of the Fortune 100 and 10 of the world’s top 10 banks. ActiveViam is a financial data analytics solution provider trusted by financial institutions. Its flagship product, Atoti, offers active intelligence for complex financial analytics and is designed as a high-performance semantic layer. ActiveViam maintains a global presence with offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney, Hong Kong, Paris, and Frankfurt.
