First Look: Actian Analytic Platform

I got an update from Actian about their new announcement recently. Actian recently acquired ParAccel (reviewed here) and Pervasive (see my reviews of RushAnalyzer and DataRush) and for 2014 they are bringing all this IP together into a new Actian Analytic Platform. Actian is now a $140m company with strong profits and 10,000+ customers including more than 50% of revenue from outside the US.

Actian positions their new platform as an industrialized platform that is priced disruptively and delivers rich, easy to use functionality. In particular that the new platform is not limited to programmer-centric data scientists, that it leverages a company’s current infrastructure, and that it delivers great performance on commodity hardware.

Actian sees its stack delivering a comprehensive solution that provides the ability to connect, analyze and act: They offer high performance data integration for data from enterprise solutions, social channels, the internet of things and SaaS applications. They deliver capabilities to analyze this data, including a high performance columnar database and support for advanced analytics for a wide range of data from traditional to Hadoop and NoSQL.

The whole platform is increasingly Hadoop centric and offers a modern GUI along with in-memory analytics, hundreds of data connectors and highly scalable engines. The components are DataFlow (derived from the Pervasive DataRush product and now Yarn-certified) and a pair of analytic databases – Matrix (the old ParAccel database) and Vector.

Actian claims that their price/performance is such that they are offering large multipliers over other products. They feel that re-writing their various components for a modern hardware and software environment has delivered tremendous improvements.

So the new platform (announced today here) is positioned as comprehensive, proven and disruptively priced. You can get more information on Actian and its analytic platform here. Actian is one of the vendors listed in our Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies report.