In a world where everything is changing too quickly, the evolution towards agile, interoperable data services is a welcome change. Data is now able to be delivered as a service, without the need for costly investments in data centers and the resources needed to manage them. As more companies embrace the cloud, data integration…
Digital transformation of business is one of the biggest trends of the IT industry during the past few years and is projected to continue to be an important part of companies' business strategies through 2020. With digital transformation initiatives, companies are transforming business processes to leverage modern technology in new ways - deeply integrating…
How quickly does your business environment changes? Are your leaders using outdated information, and do they know it? Do you find your data is slowing your decision-making processes and preventing you from being truly agile? Imagine what you could do if you were to harness the power of real-time data. Modern businesses operate in…
This week Lifeboat announced their new contract to distribute our Actian product lines through their vast reseller channels as well as direct to their customers (you can find details here). Speaking as the Actian Product Management and Marketing lead for one of those product lines, the Actian Zen Edge database family, this is a…
I recently took a last-minute trip from San Francisco to India. The best fare in economy I could find was on a sixteen-hour Air India flight, direct to New Delhi. I figured I’d get a lot of work done on the flight and, if not, at least I could catch-up on movie watching. Turns…
We all hear about how forward-thinking companies, small and large, need to be more customer focused, even customer obsessed, to be successful in this hypercompetitive world. Data drives knowledge about your customers’ needs and behaviors, so you can actively tailor your messaging and offers to rise above the competition and win their business. This…
Early in my career I studied Systems Engineering at night which is where I first came across the term IPO which is an acronym for Input-Processing-Output. My lecturer taught us every software function has three basic sequential steps, reading input data, processing that data and eventually outputting it. In a more complex system, such…
We’re excited to announce that HCL Technologies (HCL), a leading global technology company, and Sumeru Equity Partners (SEP), a technology-focused private equity firm, have signed a definitive agreement to assume 100 percent ownership of Actian Corporation. For Actian, it means the company will benefit from HCL’s expertise in delivering next generation solutions for the…
Interested in jolting your data analytics and database performance? Join Actian in two separate meetings this week in both Detroit, Michigan and Cambridge Massachusetts to talk about hybrid data, performance, analytics, and dataintegration: Tuesday, March 13: Come to the JOLT YOUR PERFORMANCE BREAKFAST between 7:30–9am at the award winning Apparatus Room Restaurant conveniently located…
Starting off the new year in style by hitting Las Vegas and attending the annual TDWI Conference focused on big data and analytics? Come see Actian at on the exhibit hall floor, Booth #205, Forum Ballroom of Caesar's Palace, at these times: Tuesday, February 13: 11:15am - 2:15pm and 5:00pm-7:00pm (Leadership Summit reception in…
Recently I wrote an article that was entitled, “Why Actian DataConnect Goes Head to Head with the Big Boys”. I thought it might be beneficial to show a use-case for why this is important. As a developer and data integrator, there are many concepts that are important when designing a product. Some of these…
Doug Inkster is an Actian Fellow with a long history in the database market, starting with IDMS in the 1970’s and moving to Ingres in the 1990’s. We asked him to reminisce about the most exciting times in his long career. Here are some of his thoughts: In my 40+ years of working with…
As an employee new to Actian I decided to dig into what makes Actian Vector a star performer. Three specific qualities, covered below, caught my eye as I reviewed the technical overview. Vectorization: When I first heard this term, my memory went back to 30 years ago, when IBM offered my employer, Watson Calculating Services…
When a major UK logistics company wanted to improve reporting for its large accounts, they turned to Actian to design, implement and support the underlying database system (“LARS”) using Ingres, HVR and Vector products for its architecture. The Brief The customer had around 100 Customer Accounts Representatives dedicated to large accounts, with each Rep…
Join us at the Strata Data New York conference next week at Jacob K Javits Convention Center to learn how our data management and analytics products can help you manage and analyze hybrid data to better gain business insights. This O'Reilly conference takes place September 25-28, with an opening reception from 5-6:30pm Tuesday in…
The Age of Data has arrived, with new data sources, targets and processing models proliferating madly across enterprises of all sizes. While data has never been more valuable to a business — it now informs the who, what, where, when and how of decision making — this new hybrid data landscape introduces new challenges.…
We're excited to be at Knowledge17 this year to show how the Actian hybrid integration platform can connect ServiceNow to your existing data sources, including on-premises and cloud-based applications. The ServiceNow model can define, structure and automate the flow of work within your enterprise, but only if you can connect to other applications and…
After a recent Actian webinar featuring Forrester Research, John Bard, senior director of product marketing at Actian, asked Forrester principal analyst Michele Goetz more about the trends in today's enterprise data market. Here is the first part of that conversation: John Bard, Actian: The enterprise market tends to think of “hybrid” as on-premises or cloud,…
Imagine this scenario - you have just "clicked" on an item that you are ordering online. What kind of "data trail" have you generated? Well, you are sure to have generated a transaction - the kind of "business event" that goes into a seller's accounting system, and then on to their data warehouse for subsequent sales…
It is rare in life that one gets an opportunity to step back, take a fresh look and reset one’s mission and trajectory. For Actian, today is such a day, as we launch a new vision, a new product solution portfolio and of course, a new tag line. Got to have a new tag…
Back when I started off in the industry, some 20 something years ago (I do pretend I am still in my 20s so that number has a nice ring to it) there was only one IT Department with one manager in most large organizations. Now there are multiple managers within different departments, some aligned…
Actian announced a new record TPC-H result with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel to demonstrate the big data analytics performance of the new Intel Xeon processor E7-8890 v4. With over 2.14M QphH and $0.38/QphH, Actian Vector sets new records for performance and price/performance on non-clustered systems for the 3000GB scale factor. These numbers beat…
Kiabi, a global retailer of ready-to-wear fashion at affordable prices based in France needed to replace a legacy data management platform that was unable to support real-time analytics in a high-volume global retail environment. A proof of concept test demonstrated that the Actian Analytics Platform was clearly the performance leader to meet this customer’s real-time data…
Wow – 10 years of Hadoop, what a ride. Actian has been working in the Hadoop ecosystem almost since the beginning, starting in 2007. Actian started working with Hortonworks the moment they launched in 2011. As a pioneer in this space, we have witnessed the whole “boom”. And while Hadoop is continuing to show…
Known as the Father of Vector Database Processing, Peter Boncz is the Senior Research Scientist at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Professor at VU University Amsterdam, and Chief Technical Advisor to Actian Corporation, the first company to assemble an end-to-end big data analytics platform that runs natively on Hadoop. He architected two breakthrough database…
One of the things I talk to organizations about regularly when they’re trying to get their heads around big data and analytics is the importance of data quality before they start with analytics. Here, I am reminded of the old database acronym of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), and yet I am astounded by…
Loraine Lawson, always does a wonderful job covering the world of integration, and this article that covers the integration challenges and opportunities of the Internet of Things (IoT) is no exception. Besides big data, I see the IoT as one of the most interesting data integration challenges coming down the road. Perhaps it’s time…
Telemetry is the automated communications process by which measurements are made and data collected at remote points. The data is then transmitted to receiving equipment for monitoring. The word ‘telemetry’ is derived from Greek roots: tele = remote, and metron = measure. Telemetry is not a new concept, that’s for sure. We’ve been watching…
We often watch new positions sprout up around emerging technology. These days, we see new titles such as the chief cloud officer, and other titles that seem just as trendy. However, the strategic use of data within many enterprises led those in charge to assign data management responsibility to one person; the chief data…
It’s one thing to read about the use of data integration in a technology journal, but another thing altogether to see it in line-of-business publications. That was the case when I read an article from Multi-Channel Merchant, which covered the business reasons for retailers to leverage data integration. “Modern software tools allow brick and…
Acquiring new customers is expensive and it is generally more cost-effective to sell to existing ones. The customer-lifetime-value concept is straightforward, but many companies struggle with determining how to put it into practice. Do you actually understand your customers’ buying behavior and motivations and what you can do to influence them? Is this information…