May 25, 2023 How to Use Cloud Migration as an Opportunity to Modernize Data and Analytics Ensuring a hassle-free cloud migration takes a lot of planning and working with the right vendor. While you have specific goals that you want to achieve by moving to the cloud, you can also benefit the business by thinking about how you want to expand and optimize the cloud once you’ve migrated. For example,… Read More
May 23, 2023 Unlocking Business Insights: How Supply Chain Analytics Measures Your Company’s Health In today's highly competitive business world, companies are constantly looking for ways to improve their supply chain operations. One of the most effective ways to do this is by measuring supply chain performance using real-time analytics. By understanding the performance of each aspect of the supply chain, companies can identify bottlenecks, reduce lead times,… Read More
May 11, 2023 What is Supply Chain Analytics? Supply chain analytics uses data and advanced analytics to analyze and optimize various aspects of the supply chain, including procurement, manufacturing, and logistics. The main goals of supply chain analytics are to improve efficiency, lower costs, and increase revenue. Supply chain analytics can also provide real-time insights that help businesses adjust to changing conditions… Read More
May 2, 2023 Do you Need AI to Transform your Supply Chain? I recently shared a blog called “The Power of Real-time Supply Chain Analytics” that discusses how manufacturers can use real-time supply chain analytics to reinvent their supply chain across sourcing, processing, and distribution of goods. Its focus is mostly on understanding events as they unfold in real-time. This time around, I’m providing an overview… Read More
April 27, 2023 Using Cloud Data Analytics to Drive Engagement The decisions a business makes to help drive revenue and increase customer loyalty are only as good as the available data being referenced. Given the state of consumer demands and the changing ways they prefer to interact with brands, now is a crucial time for businesses to take stock of their cloud data analytics… Read More
April 25, 2023 Best Practices for Using Data to Optimize Your Supply Chain When a company is data-driven, it makes strategic decisions based on data analysis and interpretation rather than mere intuition. A data-driven approach to supply chain management is the key to building a strong supply chain, one that’s efficient, resilient, and that can easily adapt to changing business conditions. How exactly you can best incorporate… Read More
April 21, 2023 6 Things You Must Know About Data Modernization Data is the heart of digital transformation and the digital+ economy. Data modernization moves data from siloed legacy systems to the digital world to help organizations optimize their use of data as a strategic asset. For a successful data modernization journey, the following are some important things you need to know: #1. Data Strategy A data… Read More
April 14, 2023 Top Technical Requirements for Embedded Analytics What is Embedded Analytics? More employees making decisions based on data insights leads to better business outcomes. Increasingly, data analytics needs to be surfaced to users via the right medium to inform better and faster decisions. This is why embedded analytics has emerged as an important way to help organizations unlock the potential of… Read More
April 7, 2023 REAL Real-time Data Analytics: When Seconds Matter According to Gartner, real-time analytics is the discipline that applies logic and mathematics to data to provide insights for making better decisions quickly. For some use cases, real-time means analytics is completed within a few seconds after the arrival of new data. Actian calls this REAL real-time data analytics. Analytics solutions vary greatly in… Read More
April 4, 2023 7 Steps to Leveraging Segment Analysis and Predictive Analytics to Improve CX Today’s customers expect a timely, relevant, and personalized experience across every interaction. They have high expectations for when and how companies engage with them—meaning customers want communications on their terms, through their preferred channels, and with personalized, relevant offers. With the right data and analytics capabilities, organizations can deliver an engaging and tailored customer… Read More
March 30, 2023 Deciphering the Data Story Behind Supply Chain Analytics When it comes to supply chain data, there’s an intriguing story to be told. If businesses have access to accurate data in real time about their supply chain operations, they have tremendous opportunities to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and grow revenue. Here’s a look at some of the types of supply chain data and… Read More
March 28, 2023 Are you Building Your Data Strategy to Scale? A data strategy is a long-term plan that defines the infrastructure, people, tools, organization, and processes to manage information assets. The goal of a data strategy is to help a business leverage its data to support decision making. To make the plan a reality, the data strategy must scale. Here are a few pointers… Read More
March 23, 2023 Discover the Top 5 Data Quality Issues – And How to Fix Them! Poor quality data can lead to inaccurate insights, wasted resources, and decreased customer satisfaction. It is essential to ensure that all of your data is accurate and up-to-date to make the best decisions. Still, common issues and mistakes costs organizations millions of dollars annually in lost revenue opportunities and resource productivity. Thankfully, these pitfalls… Read More
March 20, 2023 What Makes a Great Machine Learning Platform? Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that provides machines the ability to automatically learn from historical data to identify patterns and make predictions. Machine learning implementation can be complex and success hinges on using the right integration, management, and analytics foundation. The Avalanche Cloud Data Platform is an excellent choice for deploying… Read More
March 17, 2023 How Banks Can Use Analytics to Stay Out of the Headlines Financial institutions are making headlines around the world. There’s no shortage of press coverage on the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in New York, and there seem to be mounting fears about the overall health of the banking industry. While it is too early to know how these failures will… Read More
March 17, 2023 How to Use Data to Get More Visibility into Your Supply Chain Supply chains have undergone—and continue to experience—major changes and disruption. Worker shortages, rapidly changing customer demands, logistics problems, transportation bottlenecks, and other factors have all contributed to challenges. Even sales patterns that used to be easy to predict, such as those based on holidays and seasonal buying, have become much harder to understand, amplifying… Read More
March 15, 2023 How Application Analytics Can Optimize Your Customer Experience Strategy With growing concerns of a recession, many application providers are turning their attention to developing a better customer experience strategy for their existing customers. This strategy often includes application analytics to improve customer retention and growth. Here’s a quick look at what application analytics is and ways to use it to measure and improve… Read More
February 28, 2023 5 Ways to Optimize Behavior Analysis for CX Customers are telling you what they want from your business. Are you listening? Do you even have the ability to listen so you can predict what they’ll do next? If not, it’s going to be very difficult to meet customer expectations by providing personalized and meaningful interactions. With the right platform and strategy, businesses… Read More
February 28, 2023 5 Important Customer Experience Scoring Methods After reading “Forrester 2023 Customer Experience Predictions”, it was surprising to see one of its projections – 20% of customer experience (CX) programs will disappear this year. Forrester explains that companies for which great CX is not part of their brand identity will demand proof that CX spending is necessary. Unfortunately, 54% of CX… Read More
February 28, 2023 7 Customer Analytics Techniques to Get to Know Your Customer Better Would you like to know more about your customers to improve engagement? Are you able to make them loyal and increase their lifetime value? These are some of the questions that customer analytics can help answer. Customer analytics, also called customer data analytics, is the systematic examination of a company's customer information and behavior to identify,… Read More
February 28, 2023 6 Predictive Analytics Steps to Reduce Customer Churn Keeping customer churn in check is dire, as it typically costs more to acquire a customer than to retain customers. To help businesses retain their customers, data scientists and IT analysts should consider customer churn analysis to better predict customer behavior. Here’s a quick overview of the tools necessary to predict customer churn. Calculate… Read More
February 21, 2023 9 Essential Blog Articles to Help You Know Your Customer Better Competition for customers is more intense than ever. And landing customers is only half the battle. Keeping them happy is the other half. Creating customers for life entails nurturing relationships and predicting changing needs, or risk losing customers to competitors. Innovative marketers understand the importance of knowing their customers so they can meet their… Read More
February 16, 2023 5 Tips to Transition from Multichannel to Omnichannel Customers want outcomes and consistency as they move across their preferred channels. However, many organizations are struggling to transition from multichannel marketing strategies to omnichannel marketing strategies. What is Multichannel? A channel is any place where a customer interacts with the company. Most businesses rely on a mix of channels to interact with their customers… Read More
February 14, 2023 7 Ways Market Basket Analysis Can Make You More Money Market basket analysis, also referred to as affinity analysis, uses machine learning to increase sales by analyzing customer purchasing patterns. You can use market basket analysis for analyzing large data sets, such as purchase history, to reveal products and product groups, that customers are likely to purchase together. Market basket analysis is a very valuable… Read More
January 31, 2023 Ventana Research Analyst Perspective, Actian Manages Avalanches of Data Matt Aslett, VP & Research Director at Ventana Research, just wrote an Analyst Perspective called Actian Manages Avalanches of Data. He gives the Avalanche Cloud Data Platform a positive review and concludes by saying, “I recommend that organizations migrating to the cloud and looking for a cloud data platform with integration and management capabilities… Read More
January 17, 2023 A Beginner’s Roadmap for Adopting and Using Cloud Data Analytics Data managers have their hands full when it comes to their data analytics strategies. Datasets are growing in complexity and are generated at record volumes. Processing, analyzing and putting this data to use is mission critical for businesses to drive revenue and scale in the future. To help process these new and complex datasets… Read More
January 12, 2023 Three Critical Best Practices for Utilizing Customer-Centric Data Today’s customers have high expectations when it comes to customer experience and making purchasing decisions. Consumers are looking for high-quality shopping experiences, both online and in-store. They expect companies to provide a clear shopping interface, visually appealing websites and store fronts, easy access to customer support, and simple checkout processes when interacting with brands.… Read More
January 5, 2023 Do You Have Big, Fast, Jumbled, Useless, or Ugly Data? Here’s What to Do It has been more than 20 years since Meta Group (acquired by Gartner) introduced the 3Vs of data, Volume, Velocity and Variety. Gartner later expanded the 3Vs to 5Vs by adding Value and Veracity. To this day, these remain important considerations in data analytics. However, their size and complexity continue to increase. Here’s a… Read More
December 27, 2022 The Power of Real-time Supply Chain Analytics There are many areas where real-time data analytics helps businesses increase revenue and operate more efficiently. Manufacturers, for instance, can use real-time supply chain analytics to reinvent their supply chain across sourcing, processing, and distribution of goods, so they can adjust to changing conditions quickly and effectively. Manufacturers can get the visibility they need… Read More
December 12, 2022 Building the Bridge From Cloud to Edge for Superior Operational Analytics Data and analytics are the heartbeat of any business looking to drive revenue and innovate - especially during volatile and uncertain times. Businesses have gradually transitioned away from traditional data centers in favor of cloud data storage and analytics solutions to access data and unlock business insights more easily. We expect more enterprises will… Read More
December 9, 2022 Vector 6.3 Delivers Easier Administration, Greater Automation and Better Productivity for Data Analytics Did you know that Vector is one of the world’s fastest analytics databases? We’re excited to announce that a recent Enterprise Strategy Group evaluation found that Vector can outperform its competitors by up to 7.9x. Adding to this momentum is the release of Vector 6.3 in early December. Key highlights of the release include… Read More
November 23, 2022 Telling a Great Data Story What is a Data Story? A story is a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the listener or reader. A data story can be like any story, but its narrative is focused on data insights designed to teach and motivate an audience to act. Why… Read More
November 14, 2022 The Best Ways to Deliver on the Promises of Real-Time Data Analytics In my recent eBook called How to Maximize Business Value with Real-Time Data Analytics, I summarized some of the key capabilities that businesses should look for to meet the demands of real-time analytics. I’d like to expand upon these key questions that may directly impact the success of your organization. How do we scale… Read More
November 7, 2022 Four Ways Your Analytics Journey Can Help You Respond Effectively to Pandemic Impacts on Customer Behaviors We all thought, or at least hoped, that the COVID-19 pandemic would be history by now. Conditions are certainly better, but the end isn’t in sight. We still don’t know if COVID-19 will evolve into an endemic disease that we can more easily live with or if there’s a more deadly mutation just around… Read More
November 2, 2022 Don’t Rely on Outdated Advice for Digital Transformation The road to digital transformation is not straightforward, and has not rapidly accelerated over the past few years. As businesses modernize systems and processes to keep pace with technology innovation, they’re looking for insights and road markers to help guide them along their journey. When seeking advice, business leaders often turn to industry peers… Read More
October 31, 2022 How to Make Your Analytics Journey More Data Driven Your future as a successful business depends on being more data driven. A successful analytics journey transforms an organization from using its data to understand what happened in the past, to using real-time data to help users decide on the best course of action in the moment. To complete this journey, your culture, your… Read More
October 27, 2022 Digital Transformation is a Journey, not a Destination Enterprises have had to adjust their business strategies to account for the rapid pace of change and transformation of the last few years. Factors such as technological innovation, decentralized work, and data volume have triggered an acceleration of digital transformation (DX) plans. For many, the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns also sped up the… Read More
October 25, 2022 How to Increase Loyalty and Brand Sentiment Through Data A great customer experience (CX) can lead to more customers choosing you over your competitors. However, getting CX right can be a tricky task, especially as buyer personas and behaviors rapidly evolved because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Consumers have pivoted the way they shop, and, given the uptick in digital selling options businesses are… Read More
October 17, 2022 What Exactly is Data Visualization? Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data are created worldwide – giving businesses access to new sources of information that they can use to create better experiences for their customers and confirm for many that big business knows pretty much everything about you. Last week, I was in Boston for sales training and… Read More
October 13, 2022 Are You Getting the Most Out of Your Healthcare Data Platform? Healthcare organizations now require insights that are only possible to gain by bringing together diverse and disparate clinical, financial, and operational data from across the organization, as well as outside it. Without access to these insights, improvements in outcomes and operational efficiencies that value-based care models promise to deliver will be harder and more… Read More
October 10, 2022 Why is Customer Experience Strategy So Important? Use the Good to Outweigh the Bad Instead of reacting to negative customer experiences and feedback once damage has already happened, an organization is more successful when it takes a proactive approach. It may seem obvious, but the time and effort it takes to overcome a negative experience is much greater than that of… Read More
October 4, 2022 Big Data and Data Analytics in the Finance Domain Big data is revolutionizing virtually every industry, perhaps none more than financial services. It is giving finance firms the ability to do things they never could before – like roll out new payment systems, deliver data-driven offers and use AI to combat fraud. Banks, investment firms, stock traders, and others have more data at… Read More
September 13, 2022 Reflecting on the Customer Data Analytics Tactics of 2022 and Planning for the Future Customer relationship managers have the difficult task of knowing where customers are in their lifecycle and knowing exactly what their shifting needs are. With the first half of this year in the rearview mirror, now is an important time to take stock of customer data analytics priorities, and how far we’ve come since the… Read More
August 23, 2022 Holistic Data Sources and the Art of Optimizing Marketing Budgets to Optimize Your ROI In the current economy where businesses are entrenched in a hyper-personalized world, it is more important than ever to ensure your marketing dollars are spent on realizing value for your business. Businesses are investing heavily in personalized content strategies to meet the needs of their customers at each stage of the customer lifecycle. But… Read More
August 16, 2022 How to Create a Perfectly Tailored Customer Experience eCommerce is a competitive field. Businesses are living in an era of hyper-personalization and omnichannel engagement, constantly vying for limited customer attention in a saturated market. As a result, optimizing marketing campaigns and driving qualified sales leads continues to be a challenge. Having insight into each individual’s unique preferences, buying behavior, and expressed sentiment… Read More
August 2, 2022 How Retailers can Keep Pace Alongside Dynamic Customers The rapid pace of change and acceleration of digital transformation brought on by the pandemic isn’t news anymore; hybrid working environments and limits to in-person commerce forced businesses across diverse sectors to modernize the way they work, and their tech stacks to keep up with demand. However, one side effect of this rapid pace… Read More
July 19, 2022 How the Right Data Platform Approach Unleashes Competitive Advantage For some time now, we at Actian have been focusing squarely on making the Avalanche Cloud Data Platform the most trusted, flexible, and easy to use data platform on the market. These, of course, are traits that anybody in any industry would want to trumpet. But they’re especially important in the world of data,… Read More
November 10, 2021 Using a Healthcare Data Analytics Hub to Derive More Efficient and Effective Insights for Value-Based Care Last August I wrote a blog about the data at the Beating Heart of Healthcare and introduced the concept of the healthcare data analytics hub. Frequent readers will remember that a healthcare data analytics hub provides a unified, cloud-based platform that supports access, enrichment, analysis, visualization, and reporting services to both automate and act… Read More
September 25, 2021 Customer Analytics: How to Measure a Customer’s Journey Customer Analytics Overview: A true 360-degree view of a customer can’t be sourced exclusively from internal data let alone from a single system or department. Organizations trying to correlate customer interactions, transaction history, and behaviors to improve customer acquisition ROI and retention struggle to aggregate and analyze data and signals across operational, social engagement, customer… Read More
March 25, 2021 What is the Difference Between a Data Analytics Hub and a Lakehouse? 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… Read More
February 25, 2021 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 does not fully address modern data… Read More
January 22, 2021 Data Analytics is a Core Element Creating Business Value 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,… Read More
December 28, 2020 Four Data Analytics Predictions for 2021 – A Year to Recover and Accelerate In a year dominated by the dark cloud of the COVID-19 pandemic and the tragedies that ensued, we seem to be ending on a hopeful note. We saw the incredible power of human ingenuity, as not one but several vaccines have been developed at breakneck speed, surpassing even the most optimistic of expectations. We… Read More
December 16, 2020 The Need for Speed in Data Analysis 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… Read More
December 15, 2020 Innovation and the Power of Data What is innovation? Innovation is doing something new that does not currently exist or something new that improves efficiency, effectiveness, cost, and/or creates a competitive advantage. A new method, process, product, or service can be considered an innovation. This also includes the integration of different markets with the utilization of a new product that… Read More
December 1, 2020 Turning Data Measurements, Metrics, and Performance Indicators into Results Data is everywhere. There is data inside our organizations and outside. Some data is in the form of measurements. Measurements can be descriptive, predictive, or for diagnostic reasons. In either case, we measure to make decisions based on the quantity and quality of something. Measurements can give us actionable operational, tactical, and strategic metrics… Read More
July 9, 2020 IoT and education: Bridging the digital divide in the age of Covid-19 Due to the global outbreak of COVID-19, schools worldwide had to shut down quickly. While many schools already operated with some online component, most were not equipped to become 100% digital in a matter of days. Further, it’s looking as if most school districts and higher education campus systems will have to adopt some sort… Read More
May 26, 2020 Real-Time Decision-Making Use Cases in the Retail Industry – Part 3 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… Read More
May 18, 2020 Real-Time Decision-Making Use Cases in the Retail Industry – Part 2 In my last blog on Real-Time Decision-Making (RTDM), I shifted from a theoretical discussion of what RTDM is to uses cases that highlight key aspects of the value it can bring to business in periods of market uncertainty. I'm using the Retail Industry because its an Industry everyone knows something about coupled with the… Read More
May 14, 2020 Real-Time Decision-Making Use Cases in the Retail Industry In the last blog on Real-Time Decision-Making (RTDM), we discussed exactly what it is and why it matters. Before proceeding with more theoretical discussions, though, it’s probably worthwhile to give you some practical examples of RTDM and how data management, integration, and analytics support, build RTDM strategic capabilities that significantly impact business operations. Retail:… Read More
April 22, 2020 Real-Time Decision-Making in Times of Market Uncertainty Can’t be Business-As-Usual Saying that the current business climate and market conditions are tough is about as much an understatement as saying a Banana Slug is not terribly fast. Making the right decisions too slowly or wrong decisions too quickly can have equally adverse outcomes. In certain industries such as Retail, Travel, and Hospitality or for smaller… Read More
April 13, 2020 Reducing Customer Churn in the Telecom Industry with Connected Data Customer loyalty is the key to profitability in the telecom industry. Because telecom providers manage large fixed infrastructures that must be offset by revenue, customer churn (attrition) is particularly problematic in this industry. Low switching costs for customers (supported by government regulations) mean that customer loyalty is the only real tool that telecom companies… Read More
April 8, 2020 Financial Services Companies Need all the Data Analytics They Can Get There are times when financial markets trend up. There are times that markets trend down. And then there are times that the markets go crazy and the only thing predictable is volatility. When markets encounter these volatile periods, financial services companies become highly reliant on data analytics to determine where the real market forces… Read More
April 6, 2020 Healthcare Analytics Improve Operational Efficiency Healthcare is a data-driven industry with data analytics needs that make “big data” seem tiny. For healthcare companies to operate efficiently, they need a high-power data engine to crunch the numbers, analyze the data, and get it into the hands of decision-makers quickly. The healthcare industry is the epitome of business agility, and data… Read More
March 17, 2020 Why you Should Offload Analytics from your Online Transaction Processing Systems into a Data Warehouse Modern businesses are fueled by data. The insights that your data bring are what power decision making, enables you to optimize business processes and respond to changing market conditions. The organizations that have data and manage it well – excel. Those that lack data or struggle to harvest actionable insights from their data have… Read More
February 24, 2020 Real-Time Streaming – Actionable Insights Drive Business Responsiveness If you want your business to be agile, you need to be leveraging real-time data. The environments that your businesses operate in are changing faster than ever – new competition in the marketplace, regulatory changes; operational issues; and new technology advancements are only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to survive and… Read More
December 18, 2019 Actian 2020 Predictions: 4 Data Trends for Analytics The transformative agency of data within the enterprise grows more powerful every day, and the ways in which enterprises manage and leverage their data are therefore in a state of profound transformation. New technologies, strategies and trends are taking shape almost daily across analytics, cloud, UX and IoT. In 2020, we're going to continue… Read More
September 30, 2019 Actian Datacast: The future is hybrid This is the fourth and final installment of an in-depth blog series examining the findings of the recent Actian Datacast 2019: Hybrid Data Trends Snapshot. The survey (which polled 303 IT professionals with influence or decision-making ability at companies of 250+ employees) identified four key trends which were illustrated in the Datacast Infographic. Our… Read More
September 12, 2019 As AI Algorithms Become More Sophisticated in Edge Devices, Persistent Data Requirements Must Advance at the Same Pace Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems seem to be everywhere and for a good reason. AI represents the next generation of computing capabilities. It is leveraging the speed and scale of cloud computing to deliver not only high-speed automation but also continuous learning and adaptation capabilities that can finally match the pace of change in the… Read More
July 29, 2019 Exploiting Analytics in the Cloud Without Moving All Your Data There Your company has competing data needs. You need IT systems optimized for real-time transaction processing to serve as the engine for digitally transformed business processes. You also need your data aggregated and optimized for analytics to generate both real-time insights and perform deep data-mining activities. It can be difficult to balance these competing needs… Read More
December 19, 2018 Insights at the Speed of Business Modern businesses move fast and the speed of business is accelerating every day with no sign of slowing. To survive, companies must find ways to remove friction in their systems and business processes – leveraging real-time operational data and translating it into actionable insights that drive activities across the company. From strategic decision-making to… Read More
December 9, 2018 When Fresh Data Matters 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… Read More
November 26, 2018 What’s new in Actian DataFlow version 6.6.1? Actian DataFlow is a parallel workflow platform for end-to-end data access, transformation, preparation, and predictive analysis that eliminates performance bottlenecks in your data-intensive applications. Complementary to the Actian Vector analytic database, DataFlow leverages concurrency, parallelism and pipelining to accelerate data movement between locations in your data architecture, creating faster results. DataFlow eliminates memory constraints,… Read More
October 11, 2018 The Top 5 Pitfalls of Traditional Data Warehouses Over the past two decades, data warehouse solutions have evolved and diverged to address a myriad of use cases. Meanwhile, the pace of business continues to accelerate, making it harder to remain competitive. These new demands can stretch the abilities of traditional data warehouses. Below are 5 of the common pitfalls that can trip… Read More
September 13, 2018 Analyze and Act on Transactional Data in the Moment with an Operational Data Warehouse 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… Read More
July 11, 2018 Actian Vector Data Ingestion The usefulness of an analytic database is closely tied to its ability to ingest, store, and process vast quantities of data. Data is typically ingested from multiple sources such as operational databases, CSV files, and continuous data streams. In most cases, daily data loads are measured in tens or hundreds of millions of rows,… Read More
June 12, 2018 New Improvements to Security and Performance in Actian Vector We are pleased to announce the availability of Actian Vector 5.1. This release includes enhancements across the product, but the primary focus is with security, performance, and new customer enablement. This post provides an overview of some features added to this release. Security With the advent of GDPR we’ve seen heightened focus on security.… Read More
May 8, 2018 Vector Enterprise Edition Now Available on AWS Marketplace Last week we activated Actian Vector Enterprise Edition on the AWS Marketplace, so now it’s easier to tap into the fastest analytic engine in the cloud to extract insights from your big data. We can prove that claim based on independent benchmarks by MCG that you can view here comparing Vector performance to results… Read More
April 16, 2018 How Actian Vector Helps You Eliminate OLAP Cubes OLAP (OnLine Analytical Processing) Cubes are used extensively today, because it is impossible for many database platforms to analyze large volumes of data quickly. This is because most database software does not fully leverage computing power and memory to deliver optimal performance. Some of the symptoms of this are: Large queries end up hogging… Read More
March 24, 2018 Actian’s March Topcoder Challenges Actian is sponsoring three challenges on Topcoder this month, featuring our Vector and Zen database products and thousands of dollars in prizes. All you need to do is sign on to Topcoder (for free), read and follow the instructions for the competition, and win! It's that easy. Now, the challenges themselves are all different,… Read More
March 20, 2018 Actian Vector – Community Edition Launches on Azure Marketplace Last November we announced that Actian Vector - Community Edition, our high-performing SQL analytics solution for the cloud, launched for free on the AWS Marketplace. Now we're happy to announce that a similar version has now been released on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace in a similar free-to-use pricing model. If you are a SQL… Read More
January 9, 2018 When BIG Data Doesn’t Have to Be Using a Vector FARM to Make Big Data Analytics Fast and Easy I’ve been working in the IT industry a long time. What goes around, comes around. My favorite example is how centralized mainframe timesharing gave birth to decentralized client-server computing, now we are going back to timesharing, but in the cloud. Technology does… Read More
December 22, 2017 Fast. Faster. Fastest. I was fortunate enough to attend the Actian Hybrid Data Conference at which Craig Strong, who is Chief Technology and Product Officer at Hubble, talked about how they provide real-time corporate performance management (CPM) though high-speed analytics dashboards. You can watch a video recording of this presentation on the conference sessions page linked here. For… Read More
December 19, 2017 How I analyzed 165 million flight records in seconds on my laptop It was surprisingly easy to analyze 165 million flight records my laptop. It took me just an afternoon following the Actian Evaluation guide that you can download from here. Scientists with Intel over the years to being down the cost of high performance computing. They key vector processing technology feature they needed was to… Read More
December 19, 2017 Database History in the Making: Ingres Meets X100 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… Read More
December 6, 2017 Fast Data Loading from Amazon S3 into Actian Vector via Apache Spark One of the questions we get asked for Vector Cloud deployments is how to load data from Amazon S3 into Vector in a fast and convenient way. This Blog should help answer some of your questions with a step-by-step guide. S3 is a popular object store for different types of data - log files,… Read More
November 28, 2017 Insight to Insights A fellow recent hire at Actian, Walter Maguire, told me that many organizations get frustrated with having to wait into the late morning for decision support databases to be loaded and indexed or OLAP cubes to be populated with transactional data before sales analysis can be performed. This is not a new problem. I… Read More
November 16, 2017 Actian Vector – Community Edition Launches on AWS Marketplace I’m excited to announce that Actian Vector - Community Edition is now available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. The Community Edition is delivered as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and is compatible with the AWS 1-Click launch experience. Why is this important for you as a developer? If you are a SQL… Read More
November 1, 2017 The X-Vector 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… Read More
May 3, 2016 Amazon EMR as an Easy-to-set-up Hadoop Platform Recently I helped a customer perform an evaluation of Actian Vector in Hadoop (VectorH) to see if it could maintain “a few seconds” performance as the data sizes grew from one to tens of billions of rows (which it did, but that’s not the subject of this entry). The customer in question was only… Read More
November 26, 2010 Maximize Customer Lifetime Value Using Historical Data to Predict Future Buying Behavior 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… Read More
July 12, 2022 How to Use Customer Data Analytics in Your Business: What You Need to Know Whether you are a business leader or a marketing professional, you know that a company’s most valuable asset is its customers. Today, data analytics is the new competitive advantage. Customer data analytics is about more than just an increase in revenue and customer satisfaction levels. It is about your entire business ecosystem. In fact,… Read More
June 9, 2022 You Know You’re a “Citizen” Data Scientist If … Data collection and analysis have become increasingly important as multiple industries continue to drive their digital transformation initiatives. Whether it’s to improve customer experience, target marketing efforts, or just better understand how their business is performing, data is at the heart of it all. However, to make data work for you, you need the… Read More
May 23, 2022 The Customer Journey and the Role of Data A typical buyer’s journey moves through distinct phases starting with Awareness, continuing on to Consideration, Purchase, and Onboarding/Post-Purchase, and hopefully ending in Advocacy. Much of the journey is carried out digitally – up to 67%, according to some estimates. Data breadcrumbs are left behind along a digital path, as people search online, sign up… Read More
January 12, 2021 Approaching Holistic Data Models for Organizational Efficiency Why model anything? There are many types of models with many types of usages, such as physical, scientific, mathematical, computer, concrete, communication, etc. The overall purpose is to define, support analysis and decisions, and to communicate or validate a system or perspective. Models can also be used to help speed things up or slow… Read More
January 18, 2023 Embracing Customer Profiling and Data Management 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… Read More
July 17, 2020 Market Basket Analysis Will Improve Product Positioning and Profitability “Would you like fries with that?” If you’ve ever ordered a sandwich at a fast food restaurant, then you’ve likely heard these words, but have you stopped to consider why fast food chains train their employees to ask this question? It’s because of what’s called “market basket analysis,” a technique based on the theory… Read More
June 24, 2020 Marketing Agility through Real-Time Analytics Today’s marketplace is complex and competitive, and changes quickly. New competitive products and services are entering the market every day. Customer preferences shift with social trends and pricing dynamics continuously evolve. To win in this type of environment, marketing agility is critical to identify opportunities and threats and to respond to them quickly –… Read More
August 22, 2019 Actian Datacast IT Decision-Maker Survey We have just announced the findings of the Actian Datacast Hybrid Data Trends Survey which offers new insights into the current challenges and opportunities for data-driven organizations when it comes to managing hybrid data environments. The survey polled 303 IT professionals who have some influence or decision-making ability and work in a company with… Read More
