Deep technology shifts are underway today – including mobile, cloud, HTML5, and much more – causing a fundamental rethinking of modern infrastructure. Applications today must offer high performance on mobile devices and in the browser, and they must meet scalability and bandwidth demands that are growing by orders of magnitude. Although most infrastructure today struggles to meet such demands, technologies are emerging to re-invent the architecture of these systems.
At NEA, we see this widespread re-architecting as one of the greatest opportunities in tech. It’s the reason we’re so excited to partner with Kaazing, which powers secure, real-time communications for web and mobile applications. Specifically, Kaazing delivers real-time data through a standards-based software solution with unmatched features, performance, and scalability. Independent developers and enterprises alike can use Kaazing to quickly deploy and scale applications that perform in real-time, on all mobile devices and browsers.
True real-time interactivity is a huge step forward on the Web and mobile devices. Historically, it has been difficult to achieve real-time capabilities, since the Web has evolved under a request-response paradigm, which is asymmetric and half-duplex with short-lived connections (e.g., a user requests a web page and a server subsequently responds with the right data). A few legacy technologies such as Flash and long polling provided band-aid solutions, but generally these are insecure, bandwidth-intensive, and struggle to scale.
About five years ago, the team at Kaazing began creating a solution called WebSocket, a network protocol that would enable real-time web applications through persistent, full-duplex communication (rather than request-response). The WebSocket protocol became a core part of the HTML5 standard that is now reinventing the desktop and mobile web. Today, WebSocket is a universally adopted protocol that is available on every modern browser and compatible with every native app. It is also a key technology built into Kaazing’s high-performance, protocol-rich, gateway products.
The implications are tremendous – we’re watching Kaazing’s products bring enterprise applications to life across the entire Internet. For the Web and mobile, Kaazing delivers a modern and powerful way to serve any kind of real-time updates or user collaboration. Live data is now easily available to any application, including voting, auctions, trading, and more. Enterprises are seeing the potential to modernize their on-premise systems, such as business intelligence and network monitoring, for high performance deployment to the Web and mobile devices. Beyond extending enterprises’ internal data to the Web in real-time, Kaazing also enables real-time data to and between cloud networks, functioning as a powerful and elegant replacement for VPNs.
Kaazing’s Enterprise Gateway is bringing this revolution to enterprises, with a complete solution that works easily with existing systems, scales linearly, and securely handles every challenge arising from the hostile Web and demanding applications. Kaazing has ensured support for every major message-oriented and enterprise network protocol, so enterprises can extend their on-premise applications to the client. Importantly, Kaazing supports new and legacy browsers, so applications deployed with Kaazing can work with very old browsers such as IE6. Customers across demanding sectors, such as financial, media, logistics, and government, are universally astonished at how easy it is to deploy a Kaazing gateway, as well as how smoothly it integrates into existing systems. For these customers, Kaazing is not only enabling an entirely new class of application, but is also reducing latency and bandwidth use by 10x-100x.
Today’s technology is moving forward at breathtaking speed, and we believe Kaazing’s enterprise products are key to keeping pace with innovation in the mobile and cloud space. Just as banks, airlines, utilities, and tech companies have partnered with Kaazing to deliver mission-critical, high-performance applications, we’re thrilled to join the team that is powering the next generation of web and mobile apps.