Actian’s Innovation Earns Prestigious IT4IT Award

Innovation is essential for meeting organizations’ business, IT, and technical needs. It’s why Actian invests more than 20% of our revenue in research and development. In addition to the positive responses we hear from customers for helping them solve their toughest business challenges, we also receive accolades from industry peers.

For example, we recently earned the Award of Distinction in the category “IT4IT™ Standard / IT Management and Planning.” The honor was decided by the jury of The Open Group India Awards 2024, which recognized our efforts to effectively employ open standards and open source. The Jury Panel called our award a testament to our outstanding work and our clear path toward the effective use of open standards and open source.

At Actian, we use the IT4IT reference architecture to manage our business and the end-to-end lifecycles of all Actian products, such as the Actian Data Platform, Vector, and Zen.

This open standard is backed by around 900 members of the Open Group that include HCLTech and almost every other industry leader as well as government institutions.

Bringing Ongoing Value to Customers

To earn the award, we provided a detailed assessment that focused on the value streams we deliver and showcased how these streams bring new and ongoing benefits to customers. The assessment included these eight key aspects of our offerings:

1. Modern product management practices. Our teams successfully use IT4IT, a scaled agile framework, DevOps, and site reliability engineering where appropriate for a modern, innovative approach to open standards and open source.
2. Continuous improvement. We ensure strong management support for optimizing the lifecycles of our digital products and services with a focus on ongoing improvement and sustainable value.
3. Mature product development. From gathering requirements to meet customers’ needs to releasing new products and updates, we optimize robust, value-centric processes to deliver modern, flexible, and easy-to-use products.
4. Ongoing customer focus. The customer is at the heart of everything we do. We maintain a strong customer focus, ensuring our products meet their business needs to build confidence in the user and data management experience.
5. An automation mindset. Operations are streamlined using automated order fulfillment to provide quick and easy delivery to the customer.
6. Accurate billing. Established mechanisms for metering and billing customers provide a quick overview of the Actian Units used in the cloud while ensuring transparent and accurate pricing.
7. Trusted reliability. We employ a proactive approach to system reliability using site reliability engineering.
8. Tool rationalization initiative. With ongoing initiatives to optimize the software landscape in engineering and throughout our organization, we drive increased efficiency and reduce costs.

What Does the Product Journey Look Like?

Delivering industry-leading products requires detailed steps to ensure success. Our journey to product delivery is represented in detail here:

This is how the four aspects work together and are implemented:

1. Strategy to Portfolio. In this planning process, Actian manages ISO 27001-compliant internal and external policies in Confluence. The strategic planning is handled by a dedicated team with regular reviews by the project management office and executive leadership team. This aligns the plans to our vision and governance through the executive team.

Based on these plans, the executive leadership team provides strategic funding and resource allocation for the development of projects. The development and governance of the architecture roadmap are managed by the architecture board.

2. Requirement to Deploy. This building process entails sprint grooming to ensure a clear understanding of user stories and to facilitate the required collection and tracking of requirements, which then benefit future products and features.

At Actian, we use efficient, automated deployments with small batch continuous integration, robust testing, version control, and seamless integrations in our development processes. This is complemented by efficient testing, extensive automation, version-controlled test cases, realistic performance testing, and integrated shift-left practices in continuous integration and continuous development pipelines with defect management.

Of course, source code version control is used to ensure traceability through testing and comments, and to promote code reuse. The code changes are traceable for build package promotion, automated validation, and centralized repository.

3. Request to Fulfill. In this process, during and after delivery, Actian provides a strong user engagement with self-service resources, efficient ordering and fulfillment, integrated support, effective ticket management, and collaborative issue resolution.

The external service offering is efficient, with strong contract management, knowledge sharing, and automated deployment plans along with Jira service desk and Salesforce integration. Customer instances are created via self-service with automated orchestration, deployment guidelines, Kubernetes provisioning, and continuous deployment. In addition, the billing system provides a robust usage and metering Actian Unit hour calculation system with RabbitMQ integration and usage history generation.

4. Detect to Correct. In this final process that involves running the product, Actian provides collaborative SLA performance reviews in tiered service contracts (Gold, Silver, and Bronze), and Salesforce integration for SLA data. Knowledge is shared through a repository.

Actian offers a site reliability engineering framework with clear lifecycle stages, along with a rich knowledge base. A robust performance and availability monitoring system is also provided.

Identifying Opportunities for Improvements and Closing Gaps

As with any major assessment, there are ongoing opportunities for improvements and identifying gaps in services or capabilities. These are evaluated and addressed to further improve Actian products and offerings.

Opportunities for improvements to our Actian processes included 12 instances for integration. These integration opportunities can benefit the development and delivery of products through increased usage and the linked exchange of data between departments and functions.

Eighteen opportunities also exist for improvements for internal processes. These include providing a more consistent approach to standardization and best practices, which is expected to improve workflows during the development and deployment of products.

In addition to these, 14 opportunities for improvement were identified that can be addressed by improving internal tools. This includes introducing new tools as well as unifying and streamlining existing heterogeneous tools.

Curious how our products and services can help your business make confident, data-driven decisions? Let’s talk.

About Steffen Harre

Steffen Harre is the Director of Quality Management at Actian, overseeing a team focused on ensuring quality across the entire product lifecycle. His career began at Thinking Instruments, where he established the QA team for Ingres and OpenROAD. Following the company’s acquisition by Ingres, Steffen expanded his expertise in both Quality Assurance, which focuses on product quality, and Quality Management, which ensures the integrity of processes throughout the product lifecycle. After Actian was acquired by HCL, Steffen has continued to lead quality assurance efforts, focusing on maintaining high standards in delivering reliable and scalable data management solutions. He holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Industrial Engineering from TU Ilmenau and brings extensive international experience to his role.