Actian Life

Actian Partner Showcase – Goldstar Software

Actian Corporation

January 2, 2020

Each month, we are featuring a different partner in our Actian Partner Showcase series. In January, the spotlight shines at Goldstar Software Inc., our long-term US Actian Zen distributor. Goldstar Software was awarded 2018 Best Data Management Partner, U.S. and Worldwide.

Tell us about Goldstar Software?

Goldstar Software Inc. specializes in everything related to the Actian Zen/PSQL database environment, including product sales, installation help, configuration, troubleshooting support, performance tuning, DDF building, application development, administrative tools, backups, disaster recovery, training courses and more! While based in the US, we assist users and developers all around the world to keep their Actian databases running fast and well-protected.

Why Goldstar?

The “Goldstar” name dates back to 1983 to my first applications, including a teacher grade-book database application that ran on Apple ][+ computers, written first in BASIC and then 6502 Assembler. Do today’s teachers still give out “gold stars”?

How Long Have You Been an Actian Partner and How Did the Paths Cross?

I started working with Btrieve 5.x in 1991 and was in the Btrieve 6.x beta program, so I’ve been working as either a customer or partner with Novell, Btrieve Technologies, Pervasive Software, and Actian Corporation for almost 30 years.

What Characteristics Come to Your Mind When You Think of Actian?

From a partner perspective, Actian has been great to work with over the many years. Like with any company, personnel changes from time to time, but the connection lives on due to the long-time product history and the strong sense of ownership by the Actian staff. This connection allows us to work together on both the product sales side, as well as on the product support side, with Actian’s top-notch support team always ready and willing to look into issues, whether they be problems with the product or something within the end user’s environment.

What is the Most Interesting Actian Design-in That You’ve Been Part of?

This is simply too hard to answer. In my years as a database consultant, I’ve seen every imaginable type of customer out there, from steel mills to funeral homes to casinos to airlines to doctors offices to nuclear plants to hospitals to government agencies – the list just goes on and on. The extremely wide variety of Actian database solutions is really the most interesting and exciting part, in my opinion.

You’ve Been Selling and Supporting PSQL, the Forerunner to Actian Zen, for Over 20 Years, Why Did Your Customers Choose PSQL and Why Are They Still Using it After All These Years?

Put simply, this database is the fastest navigational database around, and it uses a very simple and flexible application programming interface (API) that makes it well suited to a wide variety of applications. Many existing applications were written in the early “hey day” or networking, when Novell NetWare came with a free Btrieve license, and once developers started using it, they found it to be the most stable and fastest solution around. Naturally, as applications develop, their needs change, and when the “SQL” was added to “PSQL”, developers were able to provide ad hoc reporting and improved search functionality in their software with limited changes. Actian has kept up with the times by adding new technology components over the years, too, supporting Delphi with PDAC and modern application designs with ADO.NET, in addition to the new Btrieve 2 interface. Of course the original Btrieve interface is still there, and it still offers incredible performance.

How Have You Seen PSQL Evolve Over Time? Is it Keeping Up With Your Customer’s Demands?

In the Btrieve 6.x days, I spent quite a bit of time sleeping in data centers doing “over-the-weekend” database conversions, running on NetWare 80386 servers at a whopping 33MHz with 32MB of memory and 800MB of disk space. Operating systems, CPU speeds, memory, and disk space have been changing ever since. Subsequent operating system support evolved to include DOS, NetWare, Windows 3.1, Windows 9.x, Windows NT, OS/2, Windows Server and Linux variants, including Mac OSX and Raspbian, and now iOS and Android, too. CPU speeds today are 100x faster, of course, and memory and disk space are rarely limiting factors any more, either. The database engine has also kept pace over the years. With Pervasive.SQL 7, files broke the old 4GB barrier, supporting files up to 64GB in size, which seemed huge at the time. With Pervasive PSQL v9, this was again increased to 256GB, and modern Zen v14 now supports single database files up to 64TB in size. [Chuckles] Hopefully that’s big enough for a while.

Do You See Actian Zen as a Product That Continues This Evolution and if so, How Will it Satisfy Your Customer’s Future Needs?

The computing pendulum continues to swing. Years ago, the centralized mainframe gave way to the distributed PC network, but it has since swung back in the other direction as PCs are moving back into the data center through virtualization solutions and centralized “big data” databases. Now, we’re starting to see the pendulum swing the other way again, with the move towards IoT platforms and locally-distributed databases at each computing node. Actian has stayed on top of these changes and has continued to provide the same, high-speed, flexible interface in all of these newer platforms.

What is the Funniest Memory Associated with Actian?

Like family members that you’ve known forever, the funniest moments usually involve inside jokes, like golden triangles, IoT-enabled bathrooms, and the like – but these require way too much explanation for outsiders. More appropriately, the funnest times have definitely been meeting with Actian and other distributors and developers over the years, from the large developer-centric sessions in the 90’s to the smaller sessions in recent years, and getting to see old friends (and making some new ones) at the same time.

Speaking of Data, Data Management, Embedded Databases, Edge and IoT, Where Do You See the Biggest Challenges as Well as Opportunities in the Upcoming Years?

The computing landscape continues to change. Computers are getting smaller and more powerful, with new platforms coming out all the time, especially in the IoT world. Open source solutions abound, but they make selling solutions like this a bit more difficult. It will be up to Actian to show developers the hidden costs behind those open source solutions and to provide the correct value equation for their solutions. As for this old dog, I can only learn so many new tricks, but I certainly do like playing with databases, and I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

Responding was Bill Bach, President of Goldstar Software Inc.

About Actian Corporation

Actian empowers enterprises to confidently manage and govern data at scale. Actian data intelligence solutions help streamline complex data environments and accelerate the delivery of AI-ready data. Designed to be flexible, Actian solutions integrate seamlessly and perform reliably across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Learn more about Actian, the data division of HCLSoftware, at actian.com.

Data Security

The California Consumer Privacy Act is Upon Us. Who is Ready?

Actian Corporation

December 31, 2019

Officially passed by the Governor of California, Jerry Brown, and the California State Legislature on June 28, 2018, the California Consumer Privacy Act aims to enhance privacy rights and consumer protection for California residents. Finally arriving, the bill will become effective on Jan. 1, 2020.

With the CCPA on the immediate horizon, technology companies have significant work to do as they head into the new year and the demands of regulatory compliance for customer data become real. Some companies are already prepared.

For example, global companies that have already taken steps to become GDPR-compliant will take their privacy and security a step further under the CCPA. This new legislation will simply represent a new set of rules they can add to their existing compliance frameworks.

On the other hand, for organizations that haven’t yet considered their compliance strategy — like many Silicon Valley startups and SMBs — the process will likely be costly and time-consuming. Similar to when GDPR was enacted, several companies will find themselves scrambling to become and remain compliant. While this may be difficult, there are some actions businesses can take to mitigate time and expense and, most importantly, to avoid accidental data compliance transgressions.

Cloud Platforms Help Make Compliance Easier

The onset of consumer data protection laws like GDPR and CCPA have compelled the big cloud platform players to develop new services and capabilities, as well as guide their customers to ensure compliance. This is an example of how changes in the regulatory environment are driving evolution to make the cloud even more attractive to businesses of all sizes. Cloud-based companies are going to find that it’s easier, less time-consuming, and less expensive to not only become compliant but to maintain that level of compliance.

Data Compliance in the Age of Bots and AI

While chatbots and virtual assistants offer many benefits, they also create business, legal, and ethical challenges. California has already put a new law on the books this year that requires companies to disclose to consumers whenever they are interacting with a non-human agent or “bot”. This was done in the spirit of consumer protection, of which the CCPA is but another manifestation. Further, the California Attorney General’s office has identified six concepts—transparency, choice, reasonable security, limit collection and retention, sensitive data and reasonable expectations—as privacy principles.

The growing number of companies using bots within their customer experience has implications to consumer data privacy compliance, as more companies are now storing and processing data from customer interactions in order to make these autonomous systems work.

For companies that use customer data to train and operate conversational bots, data compliance will be more complicated and challenging. The need to protect privacy and anonymity, as well as comply with data deletion requests, will put new demands on AI-driven systems that make conversational bots work.

With the onset of CCPA, data compliance and regulatory environments will become increasingly complex and enterprises will need to formulate and execute on a plan to determine how to handle security and data issues that arise. For example, many organizations are hiring for C-level executive roles, or creating committees, that are responsible for the compliance of these regulations and the impact on customer data.

We have yet to see how the changing regulatory environment will influence the growth of bots that feed on customer data, but there surely will be an impact.

Personalization and Data Compliance

The desire to create better customer experiences through greater and more precise personalization is at the top of the list when it comes to new IT projects in 2020. However, companies rely on customer data to create and continually improve the efficacy of these personalized experiences. This means that there’s going to be ongoing tension between the push for data-driven personalization and the requirements on customer data imposed by the regulatory bodies.

While global organizations that are currently adhering to GDPR laws will likely notice little change in their practices, industry experts warn that the CCPA threatens many technology companies and small businesses by disallowing what the industry calls “third-party behavioral profiling”: the result of which could have a big financial impact on California businesses that use ad retargeting to sell more products.

Beyond hiring and implementing internal committees, enterprises should focus on installing protocols and data management frameworks to ensure the company’s data and technology complies with laws like GDPR and CCPA. Companies that strictly follow government regulations and are mindful of consumer regulations will likely be the most well-received, and therefore, the most successful.

Data is a powerful tool. As technology rapidly advances, enterprise data capabilities have developed far beyond what we previously imagined was possible. As companies continue to hone in on digital transformation, it results in an endless supply of stored data at every turn and in every department.

In our modern world of digital businesses, companies will need to consider the impact that the CCPA will have on a variety of sectors of the business, from marketing to IT. Conversations around data privacy and user rights are at the forefront of industry discussions, and technology companies that don’t prioritize this can expect negative feedback and repercussions from consumers and government organizations alike.

This article originally appeared in Information Management.

About Actian Corporation

Actian Life

Merry and Happy

Actian Corporation

December 20, 2019

How Does Your Company Get Festive Around the Holidays and Year End? We at Actian Go All Out!

It all started with a series of Holiday Parties in all our offices globally – some hosted at the office, some at local pubs, and ALL were amazing!

The Palo Alto office gathered in the astonishing Hillsborough Racquet Club, near San Francisco, for a night filled with delicious food (courtesy of The Sharks chef!), a thrilling casino, a lively DJ, and endless entertainment!

This year, we had the privilege of teaming up with Believe Holy Spirit for their annual toy drive. Believe is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering, educating, and guiding at-risk youth in the East Bay. The contributions from this year will directly impact the community during the toy giveaway on December 21st at the Eden Youth Center in Hayward, California. Through Actian’s generous donations, we will be able to support over 50 families with gifts this holiday season.

We also had a gift-wrapping station available right in the office! How perfect to sip eggnog, listen to carols, joke, chat and get what usually ends up as a 3am-before-Christmas-Day job done!

And just today, most of us got ugly, wearing their holiday gear and ugly sweaters. Some were cute, some were the real deals! Too much fun!

… and there were (too many) yummy cookies and decorations and poinsettias… aaand it is all those things, little and big, that make my heart full and I want to shout out loud…

As the holiday spirit continued to flourish, the festive cheer extended beyond the office walls. Actian’s commitment to giving back shone brightly as employees eagerly participated in Believe Holy Spirit’s annual toy drive, spreading joy and hope to families in need. The act of kindness and generosity will not only bring smiles to children’s faces but also warm the hearts of the entire community.

Thank you, Actian and Happy Holidays to all!

About Actian Corporation

Data Analytics

Actian 2020 Predictions: 4 Data Trends for Analytics

Actian Corporation

December 18, 2019

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 to see data re-shaping customer experience, multiple business functions, as well as the analytics infrastructures on which these systems operate. We’re also going to see 5G ushering in a golden age of IoT and analytics at the Edge.

Customer Experience and Marketing Are Driving the Evolution of Analytics Systems

For many enterprises, the most opportune areas for new digital transformation projects are customer experience and marketing. Think customer-360, Hyper-Personalization, and Contextual Communications. These are extremely data-intensive use cases that are also reliant on data from new sources like SaaS apps, and via myriad integrations in the cloud. This means that a growing number of these kinds of projects are driving the provisioning of resources, like cloud data warehouses, and informing the selection of other elements supporting the analytics stack, like data integration, ETL, and more.

But even before there’s a formal commitment to a “big bet” like Omni-Channel Contact Center with Sentiment Analysis, for example, it is marketing that often knocks (informally) on IT’s door first. This happens because marketing is now generating lots of data from the digital side that they want to leverage. For many enterprises, this may be the first time in a while that someone has come with interest in bringing a new data source to an existing analytics framework. As a result, new pipelines must be created, which compels a look at how data flows into analytics databases and at the nature of those analytics databases themselves.

More Enterprises Decide That They Will Never Be 100% in the Cloud – and That’s Okay

NASA is hardly the poster organization for your typical enterprise analytics needs, but when I read about the new supercomputer named Aitken NASA installed in Mountain View last August, I was inspired by what it meant for the future of an on-premises data center. There’s something about servers that you own, and employ a team to look after, that satisfies a deep-seated IT imperative – control. The last few years it’s felt as though the move to the cloud was a foregone conclusion for all but the most laggard of organizations.

Never mind that most of the total footprint for analytics at enterprises is still on appliances like Netezza and Teradata. These systems are still extremely performant and support many mission-critical analytics applications. The inertia to remain at least partly on-premises is now gaining additional weight, as a spate of new customer data privacy regulations come into effect, such as GDPR (last year) and CCPA (next year). Compliance with these data privacy regulations is absolutely a matter of control, and for that reason on-premises will remain in the mix for the foreseeable future. Hybrid (a combined cloud and on-premises approach) will be a part of the analytics roadmap for many enterprises in 2020 and beyond.

UX Innovation is Driving the Transformation of IT and Data Teams

About 10 years ago the appearance of Tableau started a wave of disruption affecting every enterprise data analytics team. This resulted from two things – the ability to sever the dependence data analysts and data scientists had on IT to access useful data sets, and the empowerment of a slick, web-based UI that made it easier than ever to explore data and derive insights. Since then, the democratization of access to insights from data has accelerated as subsequent innovators on the visualization front, like Looker and Qlik, continue to innovate in UI and cloud-based performance.

In 2020 and beyond, this democratization of access to and power over data will extend to other parts of the analytics stack. The low-code/no-code movement has come to many areas and functions that historically supported analytics, such as data integration and ETL. The provisioning of analytics databases (data warehouses) is much easier and far less demanding of traditional technical skills. The proliferation of easy-to-use drag-and-drop interfaces combined with the instant availability of cloud-based services is driving a Seachange for IT personnel. The old guard of DBAs and their engineering-minded ilk are being replaced by a new class of enterprise data wranglers whose core skills come from understanding how to orchestrate the flow of data to drive better business outcomes.

5G Opens the Door to a Golden Age of Edge Computing in IoT

With the promise to provide huge bandwidth and peer-to-peer interactions between devices, 5G networks will create richer shared information and analysis performed at the edge – all without the latency from having to use back-end systems to act as arbitration and central analysis for edge operations.

With higher network bandwidth, several industries – including communications, media and entertainment, logistics and transportation, healthcare, manufacturing, education and smart cities – will see major shifts take place. We’ll see secure localized groups join 5G-enabled augmented reality and virtual reality games, meetings and other localized peer-to-peer scenarios. Smart homes or smart hospital rooms, where local integration and decision-making capabilities are essential, will have multiple connected devices sharing information and performing analysis more quickly and seamlessly.

Moving into next year, we’ll see increased interaction between local devices and gateways as consumers and organizations integrate 5G, and these interactions will create new use patterns. Interactions will have the potential to improve, and even radically change, decision-making by both devices and people at the edge.

On the 2020 Horizon

The desire to do more and greater things with data is perhaps the most important overall trend shaping business today. What was speculative a few years ago and impossible a few years before that will take shape and become a large part of what’s propelling the enterprise forward in 2020. Our Actian team is humbly inspired and energized by what will yet become possible with data in the future.

This article was originally published on VMBlog.

About Actian Corporation

Data Integration

Why Do SaaS Companies Need an Integration Platform to Offer?

Actian Corporation

December 16, 2019

Over the past five years, software as a service (SaaS) has become the go-to delivery model for providing software capabilities to businesses. SaaS solutions provide low capital outlay for infrastructure, a scalable operating cost model and the availability of robust capabilities and specialized features that business stakeholders desire. In most cases, it is cheaper, faster and safer for businesses to implement a SaaS solution rather than building something internally or even installing off-the-shelf capabilities. However, with the expansion of SaaS offerings in the marketplace, SaaS vendors now seek out new ways to differentiate their offerings from competitors.

Many SaaS companies are looking at including integration capabilities into their SaaS offerings as a way of making their solutions more comprehensive and more appealing to their customers and more profitable for them as providers. Embedding integration into any SaaS solution accelerates product adoption, provides significant cost savings, is a more “sticky offering” for the SaaS providers, and is more difficult to replace in the long run when a new bright shiny offering comes around from a competitor. This is the first of a 3-article series on the topic of embedded integration and how SaaS companies are leveraging integration platform as a service (iPaaS) into their commercial SaaS offerings.

I’ve Got a REST API or Some Point-to-Point Connectors, Isn’t That Enough?

RESTful APIs and certified connectors to 3^rd party systems are seen by many companies as the “minimum required features” for a SaaS offering. They enable customers to develop their own custom integrations to a wide variety of other systems in their IT infrastructure. These capabilities are certainly important (so don’t omit them), but they are lacking in a couple of important ways. First is that they put the effort and expense on the customer of your offering to build and maintain integrations. Lower implementation costs are one of the key value drivers of adopting SaaS, so the effort to develop and maintain integrations takes away from both the return on investment (ROI) of the solution and increases the time-to-value realization.

The second issue is the stickiness of your solution (measured by how easy it is to abandon your offering and move to your competitor). The more difficult it is to integrate your SaaS solution into other pieces of the IT ecosystem, the fewer connections customers will build. With each connection, your solution becomes more important to the company and more likely to be around long-term. This means you want to make it as easy as possible for companies to develop and deploy integrations with your SaaS solution.

Transforming Your SaaS Solution Into a Data Hub

Regardless of what type of data integration architecture customers aspire to deploy, the nature of IT systems is that there will always be some systems that serve as data hubs and others that are ancillary systems (spokes). Data hubs are really important, while ancillary systems are often seen as disposable. Embedding integration platform capabilities within your SaaS solution is one of the easiest ways to transform your offering to play the role of data hub for your customers.

Customers will follow the path of least resistance when developing and deploying IT systems. Building point-to-point connections is slow, expensive, brittle, and difficult. If you offer an integration platform as part of your SaaS offering, you provide an easier path for customers to follow. By embedding the capabilities in your offering, you take the integration burden away from the customer and lower barriers to adoption. If your offering can seamlessly leverage these data connections (ingest, transform, syndicate the data and load it into a cloud data warehouse to generate meaningful business insights), you will have a sustainable competitive advantage over your competition. You will be able to transform an ancillary/point solution into a platform, data hub, and business value enabler.

Competitive Differentiation

SaaS providers will be able to create more value for themselves as well as their end customers if they include integration capabilities within their SaaS offerings. Act now to start harvesting this value sooner and differentiate your offerings from competitors. Once you show customers how much your integration capabilities can help, they will have no need to consider your competitors’ alternatives.

If you’re ready to get started or want to learn more, Actian can help. The Actian DataConnect Inside is an integration platform that can be seamlessly embedded into your SaaS offerings to give you the capabilities that your customers need.

To learn more, visit www.actian.com/data-integration-quality/

Actian Partner Showcase – Goldstar Software

Why Goldstar?

How Long Have You Been an Actian Partner and How Did the Paths Cross?

What Characteristics Come to Your Mind When You Think of Actian?

What is the Most Interesting Actian Design-in That You’ve Been Part of?

You’ve Been Selling and Supporting PSQL, the Forerunner to Actian Zen, for Over 20 Years, Why Did Your Customers Choose PSQL and Why Are They Still Using it After All These Years?

How Have You Seen PSQL Evolve Over Time? Is it Keeping Up With Your Customer’s Demands?

Do You See Actian Zen as a Product That Continues This Evolution and if so, How Will it Satisfy Your Customer’s Future Needs?

What is the Funniest Memory Associated with Actian?

Speaking of Data, Data Management, Embedded Databases, Edge and IoT, Where Do You See the Biggest Challenges as Well as Opportunities in the Upcoming Years?

About Actian Corporation

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The California Consumer Privacy Act is Upon Us. Who is Ready?

Cloud Platforms Help Make Compliance Easier

Data Compliance in the Age of Bots and AI

Personalization and Data Compliance

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Merry and Happy

How Does Your Company Get Festive Around the Holidays and Year End? We at Actian Go All Out!

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Actian 2020 Predictions: 4 Data Trends for Analytics

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Why Do SaaS Companies Need an Integration Platform to Offer?

I’ve Got a REST API or Some Point-to-Point Connectors, Isn’t That Enough?

Transforming Your SaaS Solution Into a Data Hub

Competitive Differentiation

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