Technology vendors often tout their "real-time" products - but what does "real time" really mean? And is it what you need? Tom Deutsch compares real time to "customer time," which he says is the more meaningful measure: delivering the performance in the amount of time that it's needed and can be used. He also talks about in-memory solutions such as SAP Hana and describes the positives and negatives of in-memory systems.

Tom wrote about this topic in IBM Data Magazine; read that post here.