Actian Life

Employee Spotlight: Marc Potter

Rae Coffman-Bueb

June 3, 2019

At Actian, we have outstanding employees from a variety of backgrounds. We believe that your life experiences make you the unique person you are today and influence what you bring to the amazing culture here. We have chosen to feature those incredible individuals with a blog post dedicated to them – I am pleased to introduce to you, our Employee Spotlight.

To kick off the series, we met with our new CRO, Marc Potter.

Growing up, Marc taught disabled children to ski – something he picked up from his father, an Olympic downhill skier and disabled ski instructor. Upon graduating college in 1992 from the University of New Hampshire, he moved to Vail Colorado to ski while he supported himself as a short-order cook at the top of Vail Mountain. When summer arrived, he moved to Park City Utah for mountain biking and then onto Wyoming to continue his chase for the perfect slopes. One day on the way to work in Jackson Hole Wyoming, he hit a cow with his car and broke the axle. When Marc later met his wife, he told her, “I was a ski bum that wanted to go find myself and what I found after 2 years is that I was broke and needed to find a job.”

Marc started his career as an Inside Sales Rep in IT network sales. From there, he grew to manage Sales and Operations for an office outside of Frankfurt, Germany. He later became the Director of Regional Sales and found himself moving back to the US, where he settled in Atlanta so that he could go to the Olympic games being held there that year. Which luckily, he did – since that is where he met his wife, Janeen! They had a daughter named Chloe in 2002 and planted roots in Atlanta, Georgia where he has continued to climb the leadership ranks in software sales. He was most recently VP of Sales at Oracle, before joining us here at Actian. As Chief Revenue Officer, Marc brings over 20 years of enterprise sales and leadership experience in information technology. To put it in Marc’s own words;

“I’m excited about the opportunity to lead the Actian sales team through this transition from on-premises solutions to a market-leading Cloud company. Our customers are on this same Cloud journey and looking for a data-driven technology company that can deliver price and performance at enterprise scale. I look forward to working as a team to become the market leader in Cloud data management and analytics.”

In his free time, Marc enjoys golfing and spending time with his family on the lake. His biggest passion is volunteering in his community and specifically working with Habitat for Humanity.

We couldn’t be more excited to have Marc join the Actian family!

About Rae Coffman-Bueb

Rae Coffman-Bueb is Director of Employee Experience at Actian, dedicated to enhancing organizational culture. With a background in People Operations, Rae has implemented global best practices that empower teams and streamline HR processes. She provides guidance on talent development, onboarding, and cross-functional collaboration. Rae's blog posts focus on employee engagement, internal communications, and HR innovations. Check them out for tips on boosting workplace satisfaction.

Data Integration

Digital Transformation Begins With Integration

Actian Corporation

June 3, 2019

Almost every company is embarking on some sort of digital transformation initiative – reshaping the relationships between employees and business processes and the technology that supports them. At the heart of any digitally transformed operation is data – data about your company’s operations, data about your customers and suppliers and data about your environment.

What makes digital transformation so powerful is that it optimizes the way people interact with data by using technology to integrate different data sources in support of processes and decision-making. A successful digital transformation initiative begins with data integration.

The Role of Data Before Digital Transformation

Before digital transformation, there was a clear delineation between the activities people performed in support of business processes and the technological processes and systems that supported them. Data was created in the physical world and recorded in the digital world. The interfaces where these worlds intersected (forms, screens, Web pages, etc.) were very specific in their designs to capture data from one world and transmit it to the other. While this worked okay to enable people to use technology in support of business processes, it also served to reinforce the separation. In that environment, the flow of data both between people and machines and across the organization became the ultimate constraint to productivity and process performance.

Digital Transformation Changes Everything

The main concept behind digital transformation is removing the preconceived notions of barriers between people and technology being necessary and, instead, re-imagining an environment where humans and technology freely interact in support of business processes. With digital transformation, there are no business processes and IT processes, just processes. The structured interfaces (forms, screens, Web pages, etc.) between the physical world and digital world are replaced with a new set of capabilities enabling users to interact freely with data in an immersive manner. Within this new environment, data silos that were built for functional IT systems where data is stored are replaced with enterprise data, which policies and role-based access controls manage.

Why Integration is Important for Digital Transformation

Data integration is an essential part of your digital transformation journey. Integration is the tool to help you eliminate the silos and re-factor user interfaces. Without doing this, you won’t be able to achieve your company’s vision of modernized technology-embedded processes. By addressing integration at the start of your digital-transformation initiative, you will be able to create a new/modern data platform upon which to build your new processes. Because you are integrating instead of consolidating source systems, your legacy and new processes can co-exist through the transformation process.

Integration and Business Agility

Once your digital-transformation initiative is complete, the focus of your organization will shift from transformation to achieving business agility to sustain continuous evolution and the re-invention of your processes. Data integration helps you achieve agility by decoupling your processes from individual IT systems, applications or components. New systems can be added to your environment and old ones can be removed freely, but your enterprise data can remain stable and secure. Business agility also refers to making on-the-spot business decisions that are informed by real-time information insights. Data integration enables your operations staff and company leaders to see what is occurring across the company, monitor for changes and identify areas rapidly that require immediate attention.

Digital transformation is an ambitious goal for any company – moving beyond the constraints of the past and reimagining an environment where people, processes, data and technology interact freely in support of your company’s goals. Data integration is an important part of taking the vision of digital transformation and making it a reality. Actian DataConnect can help by giving you the tools you need to connect anything, anytime and anywhere. To learn more, visit DataConnect.

About Actian Corporation

Actian empowers enterprises to confidently manage and govern data at scale, streamlining complex data environments and accelerating the delivery of AI-ready data. The Actian data intelligence approach combines data discovery, metadata management, and federated governance to enable smarter data usage and enhance compliance. With intuitive self-service capabilities, business and technical users can find, understand, and trust data assets across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. Actian delivers flexible data management solutions to 42 million users at Fortune 100 companies and other enterprises worldwide, while maintaining a 95% customer satisfaction score.

Data Intelligence

Iterative Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (5/5)

Actian Corporation

June 3, 2019

The weak maturity of data governance projects necessitates the implementation of good practices and feedback loops to constantly monitor and verify the validity of management rules on your data asset.

The following articles explain the characteristics of data governance labeled as agile:

1. Be as close as possible to your enterprise’s operational reality.
2. Adapt to your enterprise’s context and not the other way around.
3. Accurately reflect your data assets.
4. Unify and involve your collaborators.
5. Respond to changes quickly.

The implementation of data governance must not take the form of a five-year plan where deliverables hardly see the day. It must avoid the Big Bang effect and adopt an approach influenced by “agile” methods used in the software development sector.

The enterprise must adopt an iterative approach to the implementation of data governance.

This approach rests on the concept of validity verification, experimentation, and iterative design.

We think that a data governance project must start by curating data assets in a cross-functional way. By adopting the Pareto principle, collect, document, and manage the 20% of data that will generate 80% of business value within your organization.

By gradually increasing its reach across your different data segments, by redefining the roles and responsibilities within your organization, and the rules of data management, you will begin to seek a satisfying governance.

This flexibility also encourages the emergence of a strong data culture within your organization.

About Actian Corporation

Data Intelligence

Collaborative Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (4/5)

Actian Corporation

June 3, 2019

The weak maturity of data governance projects necessitates the implementation of good practices and feedback loops to constantly monitor and verify the validity of management rules on your data asset.

The following articles explain the characteristics of a data governance labeled as agile in order to:

The consistent practice of having a single person or a single group arbitrate data governance has become obsolete.

Data governance must not be IT’s guarded territory.

Data circulates in the hierarchy from senior managers to entry-level employees in all departments. Information on how data should be managed and what rules to follow can come from anywhere.

To create a democracy of data, where all the employees can access the enterprise’s data on a large scale, like what Facebook has done, signifies that employees don’t have to wait to execute projects that can add value.

This also signifies that data problems are more likely to be discovered and corrected. This is all the more important in an environment where 85% of organizations’ information is redundant, obsolete, and trivial, and 41% of all the stored data has not been touched for the past 3 years.

We believe that the sustainability of data governance must include the creation of communities around the different areas of activity related to data within your organization. This approach aims to put individuals and their interactions in front of processes and tools.

As a shared asset, it will be necessary to define ownership rules and areas of responsibility around an enterprise’s data. In a number of organizations, the responsible parties have official roles to play such as data owners, data stewards, or data custodians. If the formal designation of responsibilities remains essential, we think that it is important to involve as many people as possible in the implementation of data governance, capable of contributing to the knowledge, control and management of data. Otherwise known as: Everyone is a Data Steward.

About Actian Corporation

Data Intelligence

Automated Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (3/5)

Actian Corporation

June 3, 2019

The following articles explain the characteristics of a data governance labeled as agile in order to:

Implementing data governance must begin by referencing, indexing, and evaluating your organization’s data assets. Building such an artifact by only using human intelligence is rarely successful, given the resource constraints. Therefore, it is necessary to maximize automated processes regarding the extraction and collection of information related to the data in your organization.

With the help of artificial intelligence algorithms or machine learning, it becomes possible to interpret, contextualize, and give more meaning to your data assets.

With the help of artificial intelligence algorithms or machine learning, it becomes possible to interpret, contextualize, and deduce a more precise meaning from your data asset. This automation allows your data managers to avoid the blank paper syndrome and, freeing them from tedious and repetitive tasks, increases the support from as many people as possible for your initiative to implement data governance within your company.

Finally, this automation became a necessity in the new era where the volume and the variety of systems exploded. The maintenance and updating of this information repository are crucial to reflect the reality of your IS data. With the help of incremental analysis, which frequently and automatically processes your data, you will gain a high-value metadata repository added for your data consumers.

About Actian Corporation

Data Intelligence

Non-Intrusive Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (2/5)

Actian Corporation

June 3, 2019

The following articles explain the characteristics of data governance labeled as agile:

Enterprises consider that the classic approaches to Enterprise Data Management (EDM) require all parties involved to adopt a certain number of tools and procedures that can burden the processes of data discovery, thus becoming an obstacle to innovation. In a world where the variety as well as the volume of data is exploding, where new tools for data storage and processing ceaselessly pop up, a much more reasonable approach exists.

It is a means to give freedom to your collaborators to use tools more adaptable to their uses, whether it is to generate or to access datasets, of course, according to their authorized level.

This approach aims to centralize the knowledge that your collaborators have acquired from their datasets in a “data catalog.” The objective is to collect and aggregate the metadata of your created or updated datasets from your tools and storage systems. It is from these platforms, unrelated to operations, that data governance can be executed without interfering with the daily work of your collaborators.

This non-intrusive method of addressing data governance calls for the enterprise to move forward little by little. Experiment with and adjust your management rules on data and its metadata gradually so that you can establish a curation of your data assets.

About Actian Corporation

Data Intelligence

Bottom-Up Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (1/5)

Actian Corporation

June 3, 2019

The following articles explain the characteristics of a data governance labeled as agile to:

The implementation of data governance must avoid pitfalls, all too often seen in the past via a top-down approach.

This type of descending approach wants objectives and instructions to be set by management and then implemented.

This project leadership, like software development in recent years, has proven to be too hierarchical and bureaucratic, uncorrelated to the realities on the ground and, therefore, the data held by the company.

We recommend a bottom-up approach in the field, in the operational sense, to progressively consolidate a synthesis and to maintain a data governance management that corresponds to the real context of your enterprise.

We define bottom-up data governance as:

A democratic approach rather than a hierarchical one.
A willingness to solve problems created fluidly rather than by imposing more structure.
A “bureaucracy” reduced to a minimum to facilitate its implementation and its maintenance (a prevailing work principle at Spotify called, “Minimum Viable Bureaucracy”).
An active collaboration amongst stakeholders in favor of ownership and the collection of information on the organization’s data.
An autonomy of collaborators in the choice of tools and the manner in which they organize themselves.

About Actian Corporation

Data Integration

Connecting to Actian Data Platform From Denodo via JDBC

Actian Corporation

June 1, 2019

The Actian Data Platform (formerly known as Avalanche) is the world’s fastest analytic data warehouse delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS). It has been designed for simplicity and doesn’t require any complex tuning to deliver consistent real-time performance for even the most challenging queries.

The Actian Data Platform is standards-based, supporting the latest SQL, ODBC and JDBC standards, which enables it to fit into any existing data eco-system easily.

This post shows how to connect to the Actian Data Platform from Denodo, using either the Actian Avalanche ODBC or JDBC driver.

If you have not done so already, you will need to put  your IP addresses on the Allow List in the Actian Data Platform console (Manage > Update Allow List IPs).

If this is the first time you are attempting to connect to Actian Data Platform and you have not set password, you must do that in the Actian Data Platform Console (Manage > Set Connection Password).

Here is how to create a database connection from Denodo to Actian Data Platform.

First, start Denodo Virtual DataPort Server from the Denodo Platform Control Center. 

The connection can be defined using either of the following two methods:

Method 1: ODBC Connectivity

Setting up the ODBC DSN

If not already done, create an ODBC DSN in the Windows ODBC Data Source Administrator.

In the Windows menu, go to Actian Client Runtime > Client Runtime CR 64-bit ODBC Data Source Administrator.

Create a System Data Source Name (DSN) to connect to your Actian Data Platform cluster. For example, you can name it “Actian DB”.

Take the Host Name and Listen Address from the Actian Data Platform Console Manage > Connect – Generic Connection Settings.

The Host Name value is the Host value and the Listen Address value is the ODBC port. For the Database, type db.

Example:

2. Creating the Denodo Data Source

Once the ODBC DSN is created, create a new Data Source by going to File > New > Data source…

Select ODBC.

Provide a name for the database connection, e.g. actiandb.

Select Generic for the Database adapter.

Select DSN for the Connection type.

Select the Actian Data Platform DSN you created to connect to your instance of Actian Data Platform.

Enter your user name (dbuser) and password.

Click Save to save your data source.

Method 2: JDBC Connectivity

Setting up the JDBC Driver

If you made the decision to use JDBC, a prerequisite is to have the Actian Data Platform JDBC driver downloaded and available in the environment where the tools run. The JDBC Driver is available via the Actian Data Platform console Drivers and Tools link.  

Extract the downloaded JDBC package and place the extracted directory in the C:DenodoDenodoPlatform7.0libextensionsjdbc-drivers directory (where Denodo is installed) or in a directory you desire.

2. Creating the Denodo Data Source

After the JDBC driver has been placed in the expected location, create a new Denodo data source by going to File > New > Data source…

Select JDBC.

Provide a name for the database connection, e.g. ActianDB_JDBC.

Select Generic for the database adapter and Native (JDBC) for the type of access.

In the Driver class path field select the directory where the Actian Data Platform JDBC driver (iijdbc.jar) resides, by clicking on the Browse button.

For the driver class, type com.ingres.jdbc.IngresDriver.

Specify the JDBC Database URL, which is provided in the Actian Data Platform Cloud console (Manage > Connect).

Example: 
jdbc:ingres://01c77d46010046ec7.vpaasstage.actiandatacloud.com:27839/db;encryption=on;

Provide the user name (dbuser) and password.

Now test the new data source to confirm that the connection is successful and that’s it!

To learn more about Actian Data Platform, our fully managed cloud data warehouse service, visit https://www.actian.com/data-platform/.

About Actian Corporation

Actian Life

Whimsical…Lotus?

Rae Coffman-Bueb

May 30, 2019

Ladies of Actian, Palo Alto get together for a Paint Nite

When I received the offer to join the Actian family as the People Programs Manager back in April, I was elated! Through my interviews, one thing that really stood out to me was the friendly, inviting culture – which would make my new role even more exciting. As with any big change, it is not to say I didn’t have the typical jitters associated with joining a new company: will I fit in, will the role be what I expect, will my ideas be well received, etc.

Within the first few days of joining, I had the pleasure of meeting Helena Marsikova. She informed me that she, along with a few others, had organized a Paint Nite for the ladies at the Palo Alto office. I was told it was not an ‘official’ company event, but they wanted to get some time to connect outside of work to get to know one another and invited me to join in on the fun. I am so thrilled that she did!

Last Thursday, a group of about a dozen, met up after work in Downtown San Jose for dinner, drinks, painting of a ‘Whimsical Lotus’, and laughs – LOTS OF THEM (based on the outcome of our paintings, you can likely guess why)!

When we got settled in front of our canvases, the instructor jumped in with an overview. He threw in witty banter and set the tone for the evening. We chatted amongst ourselves and joked about our future careers as artists we had as the progress of many of our paintings were a surprising outcome to say the least. After a couple hours of painting, we gathered to see the masterpieces we had all created – it was a blast!

Coming in to help build upon the culture here through employee programs, it was so wonderful to see that we already have such an engaged workforce – both personally and professionally. We all got to know each other a bit better and many were able to build upon the existing relationships they have had built throughout there time here.

I look forward to continuing to build connections, partner, and grow alongside such an amazing, talented, passionate group of women!

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Employee Spotlight: Marc Potter

About Rae Coffman-Bueb

Ready to Get Started?

Digital Transformation Begins With Integration

The Role of Data Before Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation Changes Everything

Why Integration is Important for Digital Transformation

Integration and Business Agility

About Actian Corporation

Ready to Get Started?

Iterative Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (5/5)

About Actian Corporation

Collaborative Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (4/5)

About Actian Corporation

Automated Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (3/5)

About Actian Corporation

Non-Intrusive Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (2/5)

About Actian Corporation

Bottom-Up Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (1/5)

About Actian Corporation

Connecting to Actian Data Platform From Denodo via JDBC

Method 1: ODBC Connectivity

Method 2: JDBC Connectivity

About Actian Corporation

Ready to Get Started?

Whimsical…Lotus?

About Rae Coffman-Bueb

Ready to Get Started?

Employee Spotlight: Marc Potter

About Rae Coffman-Bueb

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Digital Transformation Begins With Integration

The Role of Data Before Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation Changes Everything

Why Integration is Important for Digital Transformation

Integration and Business Agility

About Actian Corporation

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Iterative Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (5/5)

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Collaborative Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (4/5)

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Automated Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (3/5)

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Non-Intrusive Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (2/5)

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Bottom-Up Governance – Agile Data Governance Attribute (1/5)

About Actian Corporation

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Connecting to Actian Data Platform From Denodo via JDBC

Method 1: ODBC Connectivity

Method 2: JDBC Connectivity

About Actian Corporation

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Ready to Get Started?

Whimsical…Lotus?

About Rae Coffman-Bueb

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Unabhängige Domänen durch föderiee Wissensgraphen (German)

Aeindre l’indépendance des domaines grâce aux graphes de connaissances fédérés (French)

Actian CTO Emma McGrattan on Semantic Layer Actian Data Intelligence Platform– A Fireside Chat

Ready to Get Started?

Connecting to Actian Data Platform From Denodo via JDBC

Unabhängige Domänen durch föderiee Wissensgraphen (German)

Aeindre l’indépendance des domaines grâce aux graphes de connaissances fédérés (French)