Actian Fall 2025 Product Launch: Make AI Work for You

Today, we’re introducing capabilities that fundamentally change how organizations activate their data assets. From AI-powered data catalogs and data observability in the cloud to ARM-optimized HCL Informix®, we’re moving from reactive tools to active enablers of business outcomes.

Maximize AI Investment ROI With MCP Server for AI Agents

The flagship of this release is our Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server for the Actian Data Intelligence Platform. This represents a fundamental shift in how technical and business users interact with enterprise metadata, which provides the semantic relationships, business definitions, data lineage, and governance context that transform AI assistants from search tools into truly informed collaborators. 

Workflow transformation: A data analyst working on customer churn analysis asks Claude, ChatGPT, or any MCP-compatible LLM, a natural question: “What datasets relate to customer retention?” The AI assistant queries our MCP Server directly, retrieves semantically relevant datasets from your knowledge graph-powered catalog, understands the relationships between those datasets through our dimensional model discovery, and presents contextualized answers. No tab switching. No momentum loss. The data catalog becomes an active, intelligent layer in the analytical workflow.

For enterprise data leaders, this solves three critical problems:

Complete analytical context: Our knowledge graph architecture enables semantic search and relationship discovery. When your analysts search for “revenue,” they discover conceptually related datasets and see how customers to transactions, products to sales, and time periods to trends connect, giving them the complete relational picture needed for analysis.

No workflow disruption: Your analysts work in the AI tools they already use while the MCP Server ensures they’re discovering and using governed, trusted data assets, making enterprise data accessible without sacrificing governance.

Maximized AI investment ROI: Traditional catalogs offer static documentation; AI agents need living context. Our MCP Server combined with a knowledge graph powered catalog transforms your data catalog from a passive cost center into an active strategic asset, providing the semantic relationships, lineage, and trust signals that make AI agents genuinely intelligent and amplify every AI investment across the enterprise.

Accelerate Data Product Adoption Through Ecosystem Interoperability

We’ve added native support for the Bitol Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS) and Open Data Product Standard (ODPS), the emerging industry standards for defining data products and contracts. This matters for two reasons:

Future-proofing: As the market consolidates around Bitol (backed by IBM, with participation from authors of previous standards, such as DataContract.com and Open Data Mesh), organizations that build on these standards protect themselves from getting locked into any single format. 

Ecosystem interoperability: Your data products can now integrate seamlessly with any tool that supports ODCS/ODPS, including emerging data mesh platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and governance frameworks. Define a data contract once in the standard format and use it everywhere.

Eliminate Data Access Bottlenecks While Strengthening Security

Purpose-based data access requests that scale: Large enterprises commonly process tens of thousands of data access requests annually. One global organization manages over 16,000 requests for a single source system alone. Traditional workflows create bottlenecks: ambiguous requests, manual ticket creation, and no audit trail connecting access to business purpose.

Our enhanced access request framework introduces purpose-based access through formalized use cases. When users request data access, they specify the business use case. Data stewards see the whole picture, approve based on legitimate business need, and the entire workflow from request to provisioning is automated via webhooks and tracked for compliance.

Reduce Data Operations Costs by Minimizing Alert Fatigue

Proactive incident management: New in Actian Data Observability is incident management that automatically bundles related alerts into contextualized incidents, creates targeted Jira tickets per specific monitor failure, and auto-closes incidents when data health returns. Your team sees patterns, not noise. They identify systemic issues and each ticket is actionable because it addresses a single, specific problem. .

This means faster root cause analysis, reduced manual triage, and a complete closed-loop workflow that reflects how data teams actually operate.

SQL-native custom metrics: We’ve enhanced custom monitoring with full SQL support eliminating the need to learn proprietary query languages. Migrate your existing SQL-based data quality rules directly from dbt without rewriting them in new syntax. For the vast majority of data quality checks like validations, reconciliations, and business logic standard SQL is sufficient and preferred for its universality.

SQL flexibility at scale: The same monitoring logic can run via SQL pushdown for efficiency or our Spark engine for complex analysis. You choose the most performant option for each use case, minimizing impact on production systems while enabling cross-dataset validation of foreign key relationships, reconciliations, and business rules, all in a single query with no pre-joining required.

Cut Infrastructure Costs 30% While Meeting ESG Commitments

HCL Informix 15.0 now runs natively on ARM64 platforms including AWS Graviton and Azure Ampere Altra.

ESG and sustainability: ARM-based instances use up to 60% less energy than comparable x86 instances, with significantly lower carbon intensity per workload. For Fortune 100 companies with aggressive ESG commitments and regulatory reporting requirements, this provides demonstrable progress toward sustainability goals while maintaining enterprise-class database performance.

Cost optimization: Organizations migrating workloads from x86 to ARM64 typically see 30% cost savings with improved price-performance ratios. For large-scale deployments, this translates to millions in annual savings.

IoT and Edge deployments: ARM’s efficient architecture makes it ideal for IoT and edge deployments where HCL Informix’s lightweight footprint (100MB) and multi-model support (SQL, JSON, time series, spatial) enable real-time data processing at the network edge.

Getting Started

These capabilities are rolling out now. For existing customers, your CSM will be in contact with you directly. For organizations evaluating data intelligence platforms, schedule a demo to see how these capabilities can accelerate your data and AI strategy.

Informix is a trademark of IBM Corporation in at least one jurisdiction and is used under license.

About Dee Radh

As Senior Director of Product Marketing, Dee Radh heads product marketing for Actian. Prior to that, she held senior PMM roles at Talend and Formstack. Dee has spent 100% of her career bringing technology products to market. Her expertise lies in developing strategic narratives and differentiated positioning for GTM effectiveness. In addition to a post-graduate diploma from the University of Toronto, Dee has obtained certifications from Pragmatic Institute, Product Marketing Alliance, and Reforge. Dee is based out of Toronto, Canada.