We are thrilled to announce the general availability of IBM StreamSets to support real-time data integration.

The current technological climate is changing rapidly as data variety, volume, and velocity rise. Indeed, the global data storage market is expected to more than triple by 2032. Radidly propogating data on premises and across clouds, applications and locations.

Organizations must keep up with data growth as data can be fundamental to operational success. In order to maintain an edge over competitors and improve their bottom-line without undermining growth, leaders need to make decisions that are informed by current data, quickly.

As a result, enterprises are becoming increasingly dependent on fast data solutions. As companies look to improve customer experiences, adapt to an increased security posture, and embrace how to scale analytics and AI projects, they need to have a sound data strategy and robust approach to data integration patterns.

Real-time data integration

Increasing data variety, volume, and velocity compounds the problem of stale data. Data is constantly changing, and organizations need a way to keep pace with its rapid evolution. Real-time data integration—the ability to ingest, process, and write data as soon as it’s available instead of on an intermittent or scheduled basis, also known as batch-style data integration—offers an answer to these ubiquitous challenges.

 Streaming data pipelines continuously consume data in real time from various sources with diverse formats and structures, transform if necessary, and then load to a target system, such as a data lake, data warehouse, or any destination of choice.  With data continuously integrated as it becomes available, streaming data pipelines provide fresh data for various use cases in a time sensitive manner.

Use cases that benefit from real-time data integration are those for which the extraction of insights with minimal delay (i.e., within seconds) provides business value. Some examples are:

• Real-time reporting and analytics: Processes and analyzes high-velocity data from diverse sources, transforming it into actionable intelligence within seconds, enabling insights to support data-driven decisions.
• Fraud detection: Provides access to a continuous flow of curated data from across the enterprise, enabling swift response to suspicious activities and empowering businesses to identify and act on potential threats.
• Cybersecurity: Integrates real-time streaming data infrastructure with cybersecurity platforms, breaking down data silos and providing rich contextual information for enhanced situational awareness, while optimizing costs and scalability. 

Introducing IBM StreamSets: the SaaS for real-time data integration across hybrid and multi-cloud environments 

According to Gartner, by 2028, large enterprises will triple their unstructured data capacity across their on-premises, edge, and public cloud locations compared to mid-2023.  Just as data formats are changing, data continuously changes over time as a result of many factors, such as changes in schema, volume, or data collection methods. The concept, data drift, refers to the change specifically in schema structure that can break definitions in data pipeline leading to costly re-writing or re-factoring of pipelines.

With IBM StreamSets now available, clients can address varying data formats and data drift with a solution that operationalizes real-time data integration by creating and managing smart streaming data pipelines to support the high-quality data that is needed to drive digital transformation. Organizations can: 

• Enable real-time data, at scale: Build reliable streaming data pipelines across hybrid-cloud environments to decrease data staleness and enable real-time insights and accelerate decision-making processes.
• Reduce data drift with intelligent data pipelines: Insulate data pipelines from changes and unexpected shifts with pre-built drag-and-drop stages designed to automatically identify and adapt to data drift. 
• Stream any type of data from multiple diverse sources: Create seamlessly adapting streaming pipelines for structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data and automatically detect and alert users to changes in schemas.

How to leverage IBM StreamSets

IBM StreamSets offers customers a scalable solution for building reusable streaming data pipelines that adapt to change. The product provides a visual oriented design for building and deploying sophisticated data pipelines without hard-to-maintain custom code, a suite of pre-built transformations, connectors to a wide variety of sources and destinations, and a powerful SDK to drive automation, all of which can help boost enterprise-scale productivity.

IBM StreamSets leverages a hybrid architecture with separation between a SaaS control plane and engines that users deploy wherever their data resides, in any geo, cloud, all major hyperscalers, VPC, or on-premises for data processing and to help reduce data egress. 

Real-time data integration and IBM Data Fabric

Data integration is a key component of a modern data fabric architecture, especially considering the growth of data volume, velocity, and variety as data becomes more disparate across organizations’ hybrid, multi-cloud environments. With data residing in across locations and formats, data integration tools have evolved to support multiple patterns of integration styles. 

Given the unique needs of enterprises and due to specific use cases, the IBM approach to a  architecture is composable, highly integrated services. Clients can choose from a set of seamlessly integrated data integration products that fit their needs, whether they be for artificial intelligence, business intelligence and analytics, or other industry-specific requirements. 

IBM’s industry leading Data Integration portfolio includes tools such as IBM DataStage for moving and transforming mission-critical data with ETL/ELT processing.  With IBM Databand, the data observability solution for data pipeline monitoring and issue remediation underpinning the entire portfolio, IBM offers clients a seamless solution for designing, deploying, and managing data pipelines across all data sources and integration patterns. IBM StreamSets is a strategic addition that enables real-time streaming data pipelines, allowing clients to address a wide set of use cases no matter the style of data integration.

At IBM, we are committed to innovating and evolving to meet our clients’ needs. Now, with IBM StreamSets, users can unlock real-time data to scale insightful decision making, analytics, and AI. Now, with IBM StreamSets, users can unlock real-time data to scale insightful decision making, analytics and AI.