Using Key-Value Store as a Cache
Accelerate Application Responses
Retailers, social networking sites and financial management companies are investing time, money and people to continue to build customer relationships. Time constraints minimize visits to our local retail store or our financial planner. Instead, we rely on technology to communicate, purchase products, and manage our investments. To do this we need an highly available, scalable, fast and reliable framework.
Key-value stores and caches are similar in that given a specific key they return a value. They are different in that caches do not persist data but, rather, are RAM resident. However, some key-value stores like Aerospike, have the ability to function as a cache and as a result improve performance and reduce latency making them perfect for consumer facing applications.
Multi-channel Consumer Facing Apps
Multi-channel marketing allows retailers to interact with consumers on multiple platforms whether they stop in a retail store, login to a web site, or send a text message or email. The objective is to make it easy for consumers to buy from them in whatever way they choose on whichever platform they prefer.
Today retailers large and small are investing in multi-channel strategies. When customers visit online, it’s important to develop a relationship using mobile applications and social strategies on sites such as Facebook, and Twitter. Yet when a customer visits the store, it’s important to extend the online experience in a way that enhances the visit such as self service check-outs and kiosks to aid with research. For customers, it’s the best of both worlds – they can familiarize themselves with products prior to purchasing, and research and purchase at their own pace.
Consumer Facing Portfolio Management Apps
Portfolio management applications are the most comprehensive wealth management offerings for successfully navigating today’s dynamic markets and staying abreast of market activity, breaking news and analysis.
To be successful, personal financial applications must be able to extract real-time data from all of an individuals service providers—including banks, investment houses, lenders, and credit card companies— quickly combine the information and serve it back to the consumer in real-time in the correct mobile format; delays can be costly.
Summary
Using a key-value store as a cache in multi-channel marketing and portfolio management applications can provide crucial real-time information that consumers need to stay connected and informed. To be successful, companies must create highly available applications that are easy to use and integrate with the technology their customers already own, as well as expand the customer experience to integrate with their lifestyle.
In the past, information on customization was stored in cookies. The benefit? It was simple, and stored the data on the client. Unfortunately, if a user went to a different computer or browser, the information was lost.
People have used user profile stores on the server for this kind of data, and this is sometimes referred to (somewhat incorrectly) as server side cookies. However, companies that want a unified user interface must have the following: