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Actian: Advanced End-to-end Analytics Platform

Steve Shine, CEO, ActianSteve Shine, CEO
Today, with Big Data 2.0 and advanced analytics, retail banks can create customer micro-segmentations, improving bottom-line revenues by precision forecasting of customer and market patterns and behaviors. Headquartered in Redwood City, CA, Actianintegrates all data, not just a sub-set sampling, in order to measure, quantify, and predict market events in real time through its analytics platform. “The Actian Analytics Platform generates hierarchical levels of risk for credit, value, margin, and compliance,” says Steve Shine, CEO, Actian Corporation.

The company empowers companies of all sizes to connect to data of any type, analyze it, and take immediate action on accurate insights. “We’re transforming big data into business value,” remarks Shine. The company’s open analytics platform delivers high performance, scalability, and agility to adapt to business changes. “We offer the most essential financial services solutions ranging from forecasting, risk analytics, compliance and regulations, and surveillance,” says Shine.

Built on Actian Analytics Platform, Actian Vortex delivers a high performance SQL analytics in Hadoop, an open-source software framework. Vortex supports all business intelligence tools and applications. The ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) compliant¬Vortex brings transactional integrity to Hadoop, which gives accurate results. The product runs simultaneous tasks without long waiting times and leverages existing investments, while protecting from vendor lock-in. ActianDataFlow of the Vortex works with all data, regardless of the type and source, to deliver data preparation at scale. A highly parallel analytics engine that runs natively in Hadoop, DataFlow is the fastest way to blend, develop, and transform big data. Actian Vortex is one of the flexible SQL analytics that perform swiftly without any complexity.

In addition, Actian Vector, a core capability of the Actian Analytics Platform, is designed to remove the performance block found in relational databases. Vector, with an agile Service Management Platform (SMP) analytics database architecture, makes performance faster and reduces analytic workloads for the user. With unmatched built-in algorithms, in-database analytics, and load capacity, Actian Matrix, another product of Actian Analytics Platform delivers a fast Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) analytics database. Its massively columnar, compressed, compiled approach offers an industry leading performance at a fraction of the price.

Actian products are used by some of the leading organizations like University of Oxford, Nikon and Opera Solutions. SecureAlert, a client of Actian, provides electronic monitoring programs and services to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. The client collected GPS data on offender activity at the rate of one trace every minute for each person being tracked—translating to billions of records. SecureAlert used Actian Analytics Platform and the Actian Matrix to transform big data into actionable insights with the performance and scalability required by law enforcement agencies. If a late-night robbery occurs near the home of an offender who is on probation for theft, time-stamped GPS traces are analyzed and law enforcements are informed that it was an offender, not a suspect. With Actian Matrix, a basic query on the billions of records in the database takes about eight to ten seconds to run.


We’re transforming big data into business value


“The future may be uncertain, but one thing is for sure. You’ll never have less data than you do today. Making the most of that data today while preparing for the future requires an analytics platform that is open, fast and enterprise-grade. Actian’s software is architected with these 3 principles in mind,” concludes Shine.