I recently started a new blog series on why Real-Time Decision-Making is required during periods of market uncertainty. In this next blog, lets level set on exactly what is Real-Time Decision-Making and why it matters so much more during periods of market uncertainty and business disruption. Naturally, what got me thinking about all of…
Semi-structured data is emerging as a critical element of business operations and strategies. Typically, business leaders make decisions based on analysis of data stored in forms, spreadsheets, and relational databases – in other words, structured data. However, in a modern business environment, constraining data with forms and tables is no longer sufficient. What is…
Today, Actian is excited to announce the delivery of Actian hybrid cloud data platform on Google Cloud Marketplace. Actian is initially available in the us-east1 region, which will be expanded to include US West, German, and Irish cloud regions in the coming months. If you are interested in trying out Avalanche on Google Cloud,…
On-Premise, you’re grounded The emergence of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and the ability to create a data lake of such unprecedented depths – on standard hardware no less! – was such a breakthrough that the administrative pain and the hardware costs involved with building out an HDFS-based analytic solution were acceptable casualties…
Processing data in real-time Every organization processes data in many ways. For example, batch data process still exists for heavy data-process workloads, such as payroll. Many of these data processing requirements are executed by batch scheduling software; however, there is a growing need for data processing to be more automated and processed in real-time.…
Business strategy A business strategy consists of setting goals, objectives, and priorities for the business vision and mission. The strategy owners use their portfolios of assets, services, and products to achieve the business's goals. A business will often have multiple strategies, such as having a digital strategy that supports their service or product strategy.…
Databases Databases are everywhere. They store data and information organized by fields and tables. There are different types of databases that organize data into relational tables, hierarchical structures, networks, and objects. Databases can be personal, corporate, and shared resources. They can be used for recording business transactions to support decision making. The value of…
Which cloud makes sense? Nothing is perfect, but we want to approach perfection with continuous improvement and the management of risk in our business environments. IT capabilities and resources underpin our business environments. On-premise capabilities and cloud capabilities have to deliver a return on investment (ROI) for our efforts and, at the same time,…
Valued assets Organizational assets are defined as capabilities and resources. To be valued strategic assets, they have to contribute to the success of the organization. There is no business value contributed to an asset that does not have an understood return on investment (ROI) for the organization. Capabilities can be defined as the ability,…
Actian on Google Kubernetes Engine Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is now running containerized versions of Actian (formerly known as Avalanche) cloud data warehouse, a high-performance hybrid cloud data warehouse designed to power an enterprise’s most demanding operational analytics workloads. Why is that important? Because now an enterprise can deploy one of the world’s most…
Why Performance Matters My very first sales call to an analytics prospect was with a customer using an OLTP database for reporting. Some of their reports took hours to run and one particularly challenging report typically ran for more than thirteen hours. Our performance benchmarking had shown that for analytics workloads, Actian would be…
Defining Exceptional Service Organizations always aim to give their customers the best experiences. There are several interpretations of what constitutes good and excellent service, and sometimes these terms are used interchangeably. However, many companies fail at achieving exceptional service because they do not understand their customers. Delivering any level of service requires that we…
What is a modern data platform? When we ask this question, we get two different groups of answers. The first group is around the technology needed for data processing in today's business environment. In this group, the answers mention things like cloud services, containers, and on-prem. The second set of answers involves sources of…
The ISO 17788 Cloud Computing Overview and Vocabulary standard defines a hybrid cloud as “a cloud deployment model using at least two different cloud deployment models.” When we talk about different deployment models, we are talking about private clouds, public clouds with multiple different cloud providers, and even legacy applications. When the different deployment…
This may seem like an academic question, but it is increasingly becoming a reality for modern businesses. What do you do when you have millions of records with infinite width and depth, and your data warehouse chokes? Do you trim your data? Do you add more infrastructure capacity? Or do you need to look…
There's now an easier way to connect to Avalanche from Tableau using the new Actian ODBC connector available in the Tableau Extension Gallery. Actian and Tableau have partnered for the past several years to deliver a seamless connectivity experience to our customers. To take advantage of Tableau's latest analytical features, the two teams engaged…
