If the first question you consider when thinking about a cloud data warehouse involves how much money you will save by moving your on-premises solution to the cloud, you may not like my answer: There’s no guarantee that you will realize any cost savings at all. But let me suggest, however humbly, that this…
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…
That's a Wrap! Wow! What a wonderful time we had at the 2021 Hybrid Data Conference! Over the course of two days, we showcased amazing demos, customer stories and technology advancements across the Actian portfolio. For those in attendance, we hope you enjoyed the event and opportunity to see a few of the ways…
The Actian Avalanche Hybrid Cloud Data Warehouse, with the fastest columnar analytics engine available in the market today, is now generally available on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) via Google Cloud and the Google Marketplace. For organizations that need the flexibility to scale dynamically yet pay only for the resources they need, that want an…
Today, Actian is excited to announce the delivery of Actian Avalanche hybrid cloud data platform on Google Cloud Marketplace. Avalanche 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,…
In the opening installment of this blog series—Data Lakes, Data Warehouses and Data Hubs: Do we need another choice? I explore why simply migrating these on-prem data integration, management, and analytics platforms to the Cloud does not fully address modern data analytics needs. In comparing these three platforms, it becomes clear that all of…
What is a Data Analytics Hub? And why is it better than a Data Lake or an Analytics Hub? In the opening installment of this blog series—Data Lakes, Data Warehouses and Data Hubs: Do we need another choice? I explore why simply migrating these on-prem data integration, management, and analytics platforms to the Cloud…
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,…
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 good service All organizations want to provide good service to their customers. There are many definitions of what good service is from a giving and receiving perspective. Good and excellent service can mean the same thing in many cases. Then there is exceptional service; this is the type of service many organizations try…
This month, GigaOm published a comprehensive evaluation of leading cloud data warehouse services based on performance and cost. Offerings analyzed included Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery, and our very own Actian Avalanche. There are many intriguing results included in the report, but an indisputable conclusion was reached by GigaOm: "In a…
We are very excited to share the news that The Automobile Association (AA), the UK's largest motoring organization, selected Actian Avalanche hybrid cloud warehouse for its insurance business to execute its cloud migration strategy. The AA is a leading UK automobile insurer and breakdown service provider that provides vehicle insurance, driving lessons, breakdown coverage,…
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…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the core of the next wave of IT systems, and it is time to get ready. The past year has seen tremendous growth in the adoption of artificial intelligence systems to help companies improve operational insights and provide enhanced customer service experiences. If you aren’t leveraging AI to support your…
In the first part of my blog on Real-Time Decision-Making (RTDM) highlighting Retail industry use cases, we discussed how combining existing historical data patterns with disparate new sources of data completes the Common Operational Picture (COP). To illustrate the use-case, we used an Actian customer, Kiabi, and how they used RTDM strategic capabilities to…
