Introducing the Actian Data Platform: Redefining Speed and Performance

As the Vice President of Engineering at Actian, I have been very involved in the recent launch of our Actian Data Platform. My role in this major upgrade has been twofold—to ensure our easy-to-use platform offers rewarding user experiences, and to deliver the technology updates needed to meet our customers’ diverse data management platform needs.  

On a personal level, I’m most excited about the fact that we put in place the building blocks to bring additional products onto this robust data platform. That means, over time, you can continue to seamlessly add new capabilities to meet your business and IT needs.  

This goes beyond traditional future-proofing. We have provided an ecosystem foundation for the entire Actian product suite, including products that are available now and those that will be available in the coming years. This allows you to bring the innovative Actian products you need onto our hybrid platform, giving you powerful data and analytics capabilities in the environment of your choice—in the cloud, on-premises, or both.   

Blazing Fast Performance at a Low Price Point

One of the Actian Data Platform’s greatest strengths is its extreme performance. It performs query optimization and provides analytics at the best price-performance when compared to other solutions. In fact, it offers a nine times faster speed advantage and 16 times cost savings over alternative platforms.  

This exceptional price performance, coupled with the platform’s ability to optimize resource usage, means you don’t have to choose between speed and cost savings. And regardless of which of our pricing plans you choose—a base option or enterprise-ready custom offering—you only pay for what you use.  

Our platform also offers other modern capabilities your business needs. For example, as a fully managed cloud data platform, it provides data monitoring, security, backups, management, authentication, patching, usage tracking, alerts, and maintenance, freeing you to focus on your business rather than spending time handling data processes.   

Plus, the platform’s flexible and scalable architecture lets you integrate data from new and existing sources, then make the data available wherever you need it. By unifying data integration, data management, and analytics, the Actian Data Platform reduces complexity and costs while giving you fast, reliable insights. 

Easy-to-Use Offering for High-Quality Data and Integration

Another goal we achieved with our platform is making it even simpler to use. The user experience is intuitive and friendly, making it easy to benefit from data access, data management, data analytics, and integrations. 

We also rolled out several important updates with our launch. One focuses on integration. For example, we are providing stronger integration for DataConnect and link customers to make it easier than ever to optimize these platforms’ capabilities.  

We have also strengthened the integration and data capabilities that are available directly within the Actian Data Platform. In addition to using our pre-built connectors, you can now easily connect data and applications using REST- and SOAP-based APIs that can be configured with just a few clicks. To address data quality issues, the Actian Data Platform now provides the ability to create codeless transformations using a simple drag-and-drop canvas.  

The platform offers the best mix of integration, quality, and transformation tools. It’s one of the reasons why our integration as a service and data quality as a service are significant differentiators for our platform.  

With our data integration and data quality upgrades, along with other updates, we’ve made it easy for you to configure and manage integrations in a single, unified platform. Plus, with our native integration capabilities, you can connect to various data sources and bring that data into the data warehouse, which in turn feeds analytics. Actian makes it easy to build pipelines to new and emerging data sources so you can access all the data you need.  

Providing the Data Foundation for Generative AI

We paid close attention to the feedback we received from customers, companies that experienced our free trial offer, and our partners about our platform. The feedback helped drive many of our updates, such as an improved user experience and making it easy to onboard onto the platform. 

I am a big proponent of quality being perceptive and tangible. With our updates, users will immediately realize that this is a high-quality, modern platform that can handle all of their data and data management needs. 

Many organizations are interested in optimizing AI and machine learning (ML) use cases, such as bringing generative AI into business processes. The Actian Data Platform lends itself well to these projects. The foundation for any AI and ML project, including generative AI, is to have confidence in your data. We meet that need by making data quality tooling natively available on our platform.  

We also have an early access program for databases as a service that’s been kickstarted with this platform. In addition, we’ve added scalability features such as auto-scaling. This enables your data warehouse to scale automatically to meet your needs, whether it’s for generative AI or any other project.  

Breaking New Ground in Data Platforms

The Actian Data Platform monitors and drives the entire data journey, from integrations to data warehousing to real-time analytics. Our platform has several differentiators that can directly benefit your business:  

• A unified data platform improves efficiency and productivity across the enterprise by streamlining workflows, automating tasks, and delivering insights at scale.  
• Proven price performance reduces the total cost of ownership by utilizing fewer resources for compute activities—providing a more affordable solution without sacrificing performance—and can process large volumes of transactional data much faster than alternative solutions. 
• Integration and data quality capabilities help mitigate data silos by making it easy to integrate data and share it with analysts and business users at all skill levels. You can cut data prep time to deliver business results quickly with secure integration of data from any source.  
• REAL real-time insights meet the demand of analytics when speed matters. The platform achieves this with a columnar database enabling fast data loading, vectorized processing, multi-core parallelism, query execution in CPU cores/cache, and other capabilities that enable the world’s fastest analytics platform.  
• Database as a service removes the need for infrastructure procurement, setup, management, and maintenance, with minimal database administration and cloud development expertise required, making it easy for more people to get more value from your data.  
• Flexible deployment to optimize data using your choice of environment—public cloud, multi- or hybrid cloud, or on-premises—to eliminate vendor lock-in. You can choose the option that makes the most sense for your data and analytics needs.  

These capabilities make our platform more than a tool. More than a cloud-only data warehouse or transactional database. More than an integration platform as a service (iPaas). Our platform is a trusted, flexible, easy-to-use offering that gives you unmatched performance at a fraction of the cost of other platforms.  

How Can Easy-to-Use Data Benefit Your Business?

Can you imagine how your business would benefit if everyone who needed data could easily access and use it—without relying on IT help? What if you could leverage your integrated data for more use cases? And quickly build pipelines to new and emerging data sources for more contextual insights, again without asking IT? All of this is possible with the Actian platform. 

Data scientists, analysts, and business users at any skill level can run BI queries, create reports, and perform advanced analytics with our platform with little or no IT intervention. We ensure quality, trusted data for any type of analytics use case. In addition, low-code and no-code integration and transformational capabilities make the Actian Data Platform user friendly and applicable to more analysts and more use cases, including those involving generative AI.  

Our patented technology continuously keeps your datasets up to date without affecting downstream query performance. With its modern approach to connecting, managing, and analyzing data, the Actian platform can save you time and money. You can be confident that data meets your needs to gain deep and rich insights that truly drive business results at scale.  

Experience Our Modern Data Platform for Yourself

Our Actian platform offers the advantages your business needs—ease of use, high performance, scalability, cost effectiveness, and integrated data. We’ve listened to feedback to deliver a more user-friendly experience with more capabilities, such as an easy-to-understand dashboard that shows you what’s happening with consumption, along with additional metering and monitoring capabilities.   

It’s important to note that we’ve undertaken a major upgrade to our platform. This is not simply a rebranding—it’s adding new features and capabilities to give you confidence in your data to grow your business. We’ve been planning this strategic launch for a long time, and I am extremely proud of being able to offer a modern data platform that meets the needs of data-driven businesses and puts in place the framework to bring additional products onto the platform over time.  

I’d like you to try the platform for yourself so you can experience its intuitive capabilities and ultra-fast performance. You can be up and running in just a few minutes. I think you’ll be impressed.   

Additional Resources:

• GigaOm Benchmark Highlights Price Performance Advantage of the Actian Data Platform 
• Actian Beats Snowflake and BigQuery in GigaOm TPC-H Benchmark Test 
• REAL Real-time Data Analytics: When Seconds Matter 

About Vamshi Ramarapu

Vamshi Ramarapu is the Vice President of Actian Data Platform Engineering, focusing on the development and delivery of the cloud data management platform. He is committed to research and development, scalability, and user experience. With more than 20 years of experience in software development and operations, Vamshi has previously held leadership roles at Mastercard and Visa. He is passionate about innovation in cloud-native development, data engineering, and FinTech.