Real time data management is vital for providing decision-makers in any enterprise immediate insight into changing business events and reducing information delays. This also helps in improving revenue and reducing risks. A wide number of real time data services are available nowadays. They can capture and distribute the data non-intrusively via a message bus (JMS, TIBCO, MQSeries) with little or no custom coding, making the database a proactive, real time player in an IT infrastructure. Real time data management services deliver data instantly from any database to any application. Real time data services are also important in e-commerce and online stock trading which need databases to process trade requests within their deadlines.

Real time data management systems process streams of data and usually these work with multiple streams at the same time. Real time data management requires advanced, event processing technology. Real time databases store, query, and manage event streams in a different way when compared to traditional data processing. The Complex Event Processing (CEP) in real time data management can identify patterns in the multiple streams of data and enables organizations to act on those patterns in real time.

Business enterprises aim to achieve the goal of real-time information flow as a way to offer better services more responsively, and at a lower cost. Real time data management systems provided by dedicated agencies find use in military and aerospace applications. These systems offer the technology for national railways, air traffic control, traffic monitoring, mission-critical combat systems, financial transaction processing and industrial automation. The real time defense information networking, which helps to efficiently deliver time-critical data to multiple applications in distributed systems, is a great advantage. The US military also relies on such companies for their distributed real time systems.