jKool Unlocks Insights with IBM Cloud

Companies relying on real-time analytics to make decisions can’t suffer a slowdown.

jKool, a Melville, NY-based SaaS company, joined the highly competitive data visualization and analysis business in 2014.

Why Real-Time Analytics Is Hard

Traditional business reporting looks backward. Data is collected during the day, loaded into a warehouse overnight and turned into reports the next morning. Real-time analytics tries to answer questions while events are still happening: is this payment stuck, did that order fail, why did clicks on the checkout page suddenly drop?

That changes the technical problem. A real-time system has to take in a constant stream of events, store them and answer queries on them within seconds, often for several customers at once. If the system slows down under load, the insight arrives too late to act on, which defeats the point.

Choosing a Cloud Partner

As an IBM Global Entrepreneur Program member, jKool got access to IBM resources and elected to leverage IBM Cloud. The company needed a powerful cloud computing partner to make sure information arrived with the right people at the right time.

“We needed to provide immediate response, visualization and analytics on the largest sets of data,” says Charley Rich, jKool’s VP of Product Management.

The company’s platform charts wide swathes of information, such as payments, orders and clicks, from its clients in retail, finance, healthcare and IoT. It also analyzes this data to highlight trends and flag operations that could be managed more efficiently.

Why Bare Metal

Out of the offerings from IBM Cloud, jKool opted for its bare metal server infrastructure.

“We’re handling tremendous volumes of data, so extreme scalability is essential,” explained Rich.

Most cloud servers are virtual machines: one physical computer is split into several virtual ones, shared between customers. That’s flexible and cheap, but the layer of software that does the splitting takes some performance, and a busy neighbor on the same hardware can slow you down. A bare metal server is a whole physical machine rented to one customer, with no sharing.

For a company like jKool, that trade makes sense. Data-heavy workloads that hit memory, disks and networks hard tend to run faster and more predictably on dedicated hardware, while still being rented by the month rather than bought outright.

IBM had originally sold its cloud infrastructure, such as computing and storage, under the SoftLayer brand. By 2016, it had dropped the SoftLayer name and moved those services under Bluemix, alongside its developer platform.

What’s Changed at IBM Cloud

IBM’s cloud has been renamed and reshaped since jKool signed on. In November 2017, IBM retired the Bluemix brand and put all of its cloud products under the IBM Cloud name. In July 2019, it closed its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, and its cloud strategy has since centered on “hybrid cloud,” running software across a company’s own data centres and several public clouds.

Bare metal is still part of the lineup: IBM Cloud continues to offer bare metal servers alongside virtual servers and serverless computing.

What It Means for SaaS Startups

jKool’s choice is a useful reminder that “the cloud” isn’t one product. For a data-heavy SaaS company, the type of server, the network and the storage you choose shape how fast your product feels to customers. Startup programs from big cloud providers can cover a lot of those costs early on, but it’s worth checking what the bill will look like once the credits run out, and how hard it would be to move if your needs change.

Learn more here about the jKool and IBM Cloud partnership.