Actian
Actian

Companies now have unprecedented access to blinding varieties and volumes of data, which - if leveraged effectively - can help them predict customer behavior, uncover hidden risks and take immediate action on insights. But the reality is that legacy technologies cannot scale efficiently or economically to manage the never-ending flow of data, which is keeping organizations from truly leveraging their data for business gain. Companies whose business models revolve around data must use next-generation software to address the issues of data scale, complexity and performance. Enter Actian - a company based in Redwood City, CA whose vision is to enable any organization, regardless of its size, to thrive in the Age of Data. "To do that, you need economic, scalable access to unconstrained analytics and frictionless integration," says Steve Shine, CEO and President of Actian.

Headed by Shine, Actian provides a path to economic, scalable and unconstrained analytics and frictionless integration. "I think what really makes us unique at Actian is that we've got the staying power, scale and maturity of an established profitable software player, with the agility and responsiveness of an aggressive new entrant," says Shine.

Two of Actian's flagship technology platforms - the ParAccel Big Data Analytics platform and the DataCloud integration platform- are built with completely modern architectures to help organizations connect to on-premises and cloud-based data sources, optimize them for business needs, perform advanced analytics and take action to drive competitive advantage. If enterprises want to implement a focused Big Data project, Actian delivers a hard-hitting, future-proof solution that gives fast ROI – without requiring organizations to rip out the existing hardware and software infrastructure. In other case, if companies want to scale beyond the sandbox to an enterprise wide production project, Actian helps in improving scalability – again, with the expected economics and throughput in the era of Big Data.

One of Actian's prime verticals is financial services, where customers need analytics capabilities for risk analysis and management, fraud detection and prevention. Software-as-a-Service companies have widely adopted Actian's DataCloud for fast, frictionless data integration with the speed and economics of SaaS.

The company has also built a strong presence in logistics with enterprises like eBay and in retail with customers including OfficeMax and Sheetz. One of its customers, Autometrics, a hosted BI company targeting the travel and automotive industries, had to "Innovate or Die" as both of its target sectors were hit hard in the economic downturn. The company realized that by assembling and intelligently analyzing the right data from third-party and auto auto manufacturer sources, they could enable auto manufacturers and dealers to predict buyer behavior, not just react after the fact. This has enormous implications for supply chain, inventory and promotions management, and has a real ROI and business value proposition. To accomplish this, Autometrics uses Actian's Data Integrator to rapidly onboard and update hundreds of diverse data sources, and Actian's analytic database to do extremely high-performance analytics on the data. Actian enjoys a broad and deep customer set including Marathon Oil, GE Transportation, Intuit, Nikon, Xactly, Ask.com, Abbott Analytics, Global Shop, Zoho, Adeo and others.

"I can't overstate how huge I think that opportunity is, by the way. I think the transition to the Age of Data is every bit as wrenching as the transition to the Internet era has been, and as in that transition, long-established players will stumble and fall and companies no one has heard of will rise to market dominance. But I think the kinds of market changes that took 10-15 years for the Internet will happen much faster for the Age of Data," exclaims Shine, who ends on a powerful note - "Actian is the one you'll want to watch!"