Blog | Data Observability | | 3 min read

Actian Datacast: Is it Keeping IT From Cloud Data Warehouse Nirvana?

cloud data warehouse nirvana

Following is the third installment of our 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 their companies of 250+ employees, identified four key trends that were illustrated in the Datacast Infographic. Our weekly blog series explores each of these four trends in greater detail. You can follow along with the blog series by visiting Data at Work, the official Actian blog.

Barriers to Success

In our last two blogs, we looked at how to fully maximize the value of available data and how to leverage the right data for the right decision-making.

This week, we’ll be looking more broadly at the key challenges for IT decision-makers (ITDMs) seeking to adopt cloud data warehouse solutions.

The Actian Datacast found that 57% of ITDMs say they have a lot of data technology, but they don’t believe it’s making any difference to their business. Today’s businesses are no strangers to technology – but is it making a significant impact? Almost three in five ITDMs don’t think so.

Today’s businesses are seeking solutions to effectively and efficiently collect, analyze, manage, and use data. Modern cloud data warehouses offer many enticing benefits for ITDMs. They make it easy to bring analytic powers to data wherever it lives (whether on-prem or in one of the popular cloud platforms), they can handle concurrency at scale, and offer great compute performance and smart, elastic storage utilization.

So what’s preventing businesses from adopting cloud data warehouse solutions?

Cost, speed of deployment, and complexity.

When we dug deeper, we found that 84% of ITDMs would deploy more data warehouse solutions if it took less time and money.

In fact, more than four in five ITDMs say one of the most painful parts of data analytics is how long it takes to deploy.

It’s a complicated path to successful digital transformation and the transition can come with a hefty price tag, but it’s important to keep in mind that the benefits greatly outweigh the costs.  The ability to comply with data regulations of the future depends on being able to put your data where you want (on-prem or in the cloud) and to apply the security protocols and internal controls the laws of the future may require.

Data integration solutions can become an important aspect of regulatory compliance, as they make it possible to transfer, transform, and unify data from non-compliant to compliant states.

In addition, more than 50% of those businesses say data complexity issues, due to siloed applications, are a top barrier to entry for accessing data and gaining effective real-time insights.

To address this, businesses need a more cost-effective and flexible approach designed to contend with a brand’s specific data complexity in order to move faster, more confidently, and with less risk.

Over half of ITDMs say speed of deployment and flexibility are very important to them in choosing a cloud and data warehousing service and/or platform, and 89% say they need more flexibility from their data analytics solutions.

Today’s businesses face a variety of difficult challenges and barriers, but we’re in the midst of a shift towards data warehouse modernization and towards hybrid environments.

We believe this will help resolve some of these problems and allow a compliance-minded enterprise to store their data wherever compliance demands, without sacrificing analytics considerations.

Next week, in our final installment of the Actian Datacast blog series, we will delve deeper into hybrid environments as a fundamental requirement to make this a reality.


Blog | Actian Life | | 2 min read

Where is the Red Panda?

Giraffe during Employee Engagement event

It was a lovely Friday morning in San Francisco. The skies were azure blue, the sun was shining, and the nice fresh ocean breeze was blowing, when we all started gathering in an Actian designated area in the center of the San Francisco ZOO. Us – the Actian-ers and our spouses, kids, nieces, nephews and friends. It was our annual company picnic and it was an absolute blast!

The San Francisco ZOO is a 100-acre zoo located in the southwestern corner of San Francisco, between Lake Merced and the Pacific Ocean. As of 2016, the zoo houses more than one thousand individual animals, representing more than 250 species, which we all got to see!

Apart from all the yummy food and the wide variety of drinks, we had so many activities available to make our day a memorable one. A professional caricaturist portrayed our joyful faces; we could have had face paint or a tattoo of any kind done; Chloe, the pig, made kids (and many of the adults) happy as she was walking in our area and was more than delighted to be petted.

We also got free tickets for the carrousel and the ZOO train, which broke before we actually reached the train station but we didn’t really mind. Kids got bribed with an extra ice cream and were ready to run around again and explore.

At one point, it looked like we were all, yet individually, on a single mission. The Red Panda! “Were you able to find the red panda?”, “Have you seen the red panda?”, “I must have missed the red panda!”… While looking for the red panda, we saw a grizzly bear playing with his grizzly mates, penguins being fed, giraffes snacking fresh leaves from the trees, all the cool big cats relaxing in the sun, gorillas and chimpanzees jumping on trees, a koala having an afternoon nap, parrots boasting with bright colored feathers… ostriches, flamingos, insects, kangaroos, suricatas, zebras, wolves… and finally, the Red Panda dossing off, camouflaged in a red-leaved bush!

Employee engagement

It was a beautiful day and we’re really lucky! Actian is a wonderful bunch of people. But having the extended families join the company event shifted the nice company spirit yet to another level.

Thanks, Actian!