This document discusses key capabilities needed for real-time analytics. It notes that real-time data, combined with historical data, provides important context for decision making. Building data pipelines with fewer systems and steps leads to greater scalability and reliability. The document outlines needs for real-time analytics like ingesting streaming data, powering analytic applications, delivering massive capacity, and guaranteeing performance. It emphasizes that both real-time and historical data are important for analytics and that the right architecture can incorporate multiple data sources and workloads.