In a digital-first world where milliseconds can make or break a sale, sluggish web performance remains a costly bottleneck for e-commerce brands. That’s the challenge Harper aims to solve with version 4.5, which delivers new capabilities for high-performance, data-intensive applications at scale.

First launched in 2017 as a distributed systems platform, Harper has evolved beyond its roots as a performance-focused database vendor into a full-stack application delivery platform — offering speed, scale, and simplified infrastructure to support high-performance digital operations.

The latest release introduces enhancements for building, scaling, and running high-performance workloads. Chief among them is support for binary large object (BLOB) storage, which enables the efficient handling of unstructured, media-rich content, such as images, video streams, and dynamic HTML.

According to Harper CEO and Co-founder Stephen Goldberg, the company started with the database layer to get the foundation right. Its evolution reflects a long-term vision to help digital commerce brands deliver faster user experiences while reducing IT costs and complexity.

Harper isn’t a CRM or an e-commerce platform. As Goldberg puts it, it’s “the plumbing” — the infrastructure that makes those systems faster and more cost-effective.

“In many of our deployments, we’re sitting directly in front of those e-commerce solutions or Oracle back / SAP back ends. As soon as the data is in Harper, the API, the caching layer, and the front end all have direct access in memory to that data as a single, unified platform,” he told the E-Commerce Times.