Realtime, a 15-year-old business, is trying to speed up the web and just scored $ 100 million in investment to make its real-time web platform the gold standard for developers and web sites everywhere. Realtime, a company that was created in 1997 as Internet Business Technologies, said it has raised a whopping chunk of change from BRZTech Holding, a São Paulo-based technology investment company.
BRZTech is a three-month old investment vehicle backed by a number of private investors in Europe and South America, including Portuguese conglomerate The Ongoing Group. Realtime CEO André Parreira (pictured above) explained that the company plans to use 60 percent of the money on R&D and hiring new people with the remaining 40 percent going toward marketing and launching the technology in the U.S.
So what is this technology that deserves so much investment? Parreira explains that it is a line of code that developers can insert into their web sites to create an open pathway direct to their servers. The net effect of doing this is that where this code is implemented suddenly has real-time access to the server. Think of it like an IM connection for elements of your web server.
Parreira calls the technology ORTC (Open Real-time Connectivity). It uses xRTML, extensive Realtime multiplatform language, a standards-based way to turn existing HTML code into something that works with the ORTC framework. It can be implemented in a range of APIs for NODE.js, Javascript, ASP.net, Java, PHP, and other server-side and web languages. It also can be implemented on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. From the company’s release:
The ORTC (Open Real-time Connectivity) is a highly scalable, cloud-hosted, many-to-many messaging system for Web and mobile apps. Due to its bidirectional permanent link between server and connected user, ORTC allows a web application to broadcast (push) data to a single user or to every connected upon demand. This is a huge improvement over needing to refresh a browser. This important change increases the speed of message delivery (low latency) and saves bandwidth costs, allowing the development of Web applications that until now would be too slow to be effective or too expensive to operate.
The underpinnings of this system are a series of virtual appliances hosted in a variety of clouds, including Amazon Web Services and Rackspace data centers, and a software overlay that organizes the flow of information back and forth between the servers and the web sites.
“The Internet used to be just like a walkie-talkie,” says Parreira. “But in the modern era everything will be live and directly connected to the source of information.”
Realtime charges developers by the number of messages sent using the system, and so far Parreira won’t disclose what customers might be using the site. He did say that the platform is already seeing 750,000 messages every second with more than 120 millions users in a 24-hour period. The most likely initial customers are those that need real-time access to information, such as an e-commerce site sharing inventory.
