The Start of Something Really Big
Actian Corporation
April 17, 2017
It is rare in life that one gets an opportunity to step back, take a fresh look and reset one’s mission and trajectory. For Actian, today is such a day, as we launch a new vision, a new product solution portfolio and of course, a new tagline. Got to have a new tagline! Although time will tell whether we have hit the mark, I can safely say that we are excited to reveal our new thinking and shine a bright light on it for all the world to see.
Our new vision is built on three observations:
1. The World is Flat
It is an incontrovertible fact that data is “flattening” within organizations today. Diverse data is being created and consumed in every corner of a company and across its data ecosystem. Increasingly, the traditional one-place-for-everything data warehouse and today’s centralized data lake just seem like old tired thinking.
2. Data is a Social Animal
Data doesn’t like to live alone – to be effective, data needs to live in an ecosystem that is constantly changing and expanding as it is touched by entities both within and outside a company’s four walls. To truly extract insight from data, one needs context, and that context more often than not comes from other applications, processes, and data sources.
3. Think Big When You Think of the Cloud
Today, the cloud is much more than a place to deploy apps and data. Although the agility and economics of hybrid cloud computing are compelling, it is just the start. A “true” cloud solution is designed to enable companies to blend together data without physically moving it and derive actionable insight, including machine learning, that can be put to work at the speed of an organization’s business (e.g., make a real-time offer to a customer on your website). The traditional static monthly report, for most companies, has the same value as yesterday’s news – zero!
4. Activate Your Data
It seems clear that now is the time for a simple call to action – a call for organizations to “activate their data.” Forward-thinking companies are applying best-fit design tools and innovative technologies to embrace their data ecosystems to ensure their data makes a difference. Whether it is powering a real-time e-commerce offer, detecting financial fraud before it happens or predicting supply chain disruptions, it is critical that the underlying insight garnered can be acted upon at the speed of a company’s business.
This is a reversal of the traditional thinking that analytics tools dictate to the business what the data can and cannot do. Now, the business dictates what insight is needed—where, when and for whom. If an organization’s IT department can’t address these needs in an economical and agile fashion, then knowledge workers are increasingly finding alternative ways, often through a new generation of SaaS solutions, to get their needs met. Serve or be served…out the door!
Meet a Big Idea – Hybrid Data!
And behind all this new thinking is the powerful new concept of hybrid data. Hybrid data has multiple dimensions, including diverse data type and format, operational and transactional data, self-service access, external B2B data exchange and hybrid cloud deployment. Our view is simple – all data needs to be viewed as hybrid data that can be joined and blended with other data across an enterprise’s data ecosystem by anyone at any point in time. It is only when an organization can adopt this progressive approach that it can address the inherent limitations of traditional monolithic data repositories (a nice way to say Oracle or SAP) or alternative siloed point solutions.
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