Abstract
Accelerating Big Data 2.0
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A recent McKinsey report estimates that more than $3 trillion annually in additional value can be powered by open data and advanced analytics. 1 But legacy vendors cannot scale to deal with proliferating data sources and volumes, and early big data solutions that address scalability limits of traditional vendors fall short on resilience, ease of use, and time to implementation. These constraints have limited the benefits of big data to a chosen few—people with deep pockets and expertise who can build entire businesses around big data.
The Actian Analytics Platform aims to deliver the full business impact of big data analytics (www.actian.com) to all organizations, not just the privileged few. Our end-to-end platform puts the power of time-sensitive predictive analytics (www.actian.com/about-us/)—rather than just a backward view—into your business flows to personalize and enrich customer experience, reduce risk, improve decision making, and gain competitive advantage with innovative new products and services that anticipate customer needs. We think that it is pretty obvious, but industry watchers and customers tell us that our approach puts us ahead of the pack. In short, we are committed to leading the industry transformation from the one-off specialized Big Data 1.0 solution experiments to what we call Big Data 2.0: an era of industrialized big data applications that are disruptively affordable with rich, easy-to-use functionality.
To that end we have aligned our entire business model as well as our entire platform to remove barriers (and excuses) that slow big data analytics adoption. We have created analytics blueprints that jumpstart how you can leverage all your data for transformational business impact. We have designed the Actian Analytics Platform to complement your existing infrastructure—no high-risk rip-and-replace gyrations involved. We can quickly implement the entire end-to-end platform to let you connect, analyze, and act on high-volume data pipelines, or enable customers to adopt modularly, addressing a specific analytics scenario to gain rapid return on investment before moving on to tackle the next business problem. And the platform is software-only, freeing you from the rigidity of hardware-based appliances that will require a complete swap-out to gain performance and scale when new-generation hardware comes along.
And Actian's unique pricing aligns with your business and offers flexibility, including the option to increase usage at no extra cost regardless of how much your data volumes, data sources, and number of users proliferate.
Fast Path to Transformative Results: Analytics-Enabled Business Processes
Our most important conversations with customers center on your business goals: if you could access all your data, no matter where it comes from, and quickly execute even the most sophisticated analytics at lightning-fast speeds regardless of how large the data volumes grow, what would you want to know? With a rich and fast-growing set of Actian Analytics Blueprints, we help you quickly visualize how a high-performance big data analytics application can help you:
1. Delight your customer—blueprints for campaign optimization, customer lifetime value, micro-segmentation, and next best action 2. Radically reduce risk—blueprints to predict and reduce customer churn and for fraud and abuse prevention 3. Define and launch new business models and offerings—blueprints for market basket analysis and media mix modeling
Once we have defined how to harness your data to gain a competitive edge, we explore what elements of the Actian Analytics Platform (www.actian.com/products/analytics-platform) is the best technical fit at that time, and which may be more relevant for you as your data analytics needs grow. We architect your solution so that analytics prompt meaningful action that enhances your business results—all within your normal operational business flows. In short, we offer predictive analytics with amazing breakthroughs in accuracy and performance that prompt preemptive action.
“In short, we offer predictive analytics with amazing breakthroughs in accuracy and performance that prompt preemptive action.”
It makes sense that our pricing lets you adopt any and all parts of the Actian Analytics Platform and extend it equally easily as your use cases, capacity requirements, and analytics needs grow with your business. The Actian Analytics Platform comes in two editions: the Extreme Performance Edition (which includes all Actian analytics plus DataConnect, DataFlow, and our high-performance analytics databases, Vector and Matrix) and the Hadoop Acceleration Edition (DataConnect and DataFlow for accelerated design and performance of big data applications that run natively in Hadoop—but up to 500% faster).
Why Do Businesses Partner with Vendors That Penalize Big Data Innovators?
We live in the age of data, with ever-proliferating data volumes and sources. Yet both traditional stack vendors and vendors born in the Internet age hit their users with painful price increases as their data volumes and/or number of users increase. Why should an organization that wants to deliver hard-hitting business value from big data analytics—now and in the future—get locked in with a vendor that penalizes the inevitable growth of a successful implementation?
Actian's “right-to-deploy” option lets you future-proof your analytics application with a 1- or 3-year set licensing price with unlimited consumption. Both platform editions are available with right-to-deploy, so for a set fee you can deploy as many instances as you like with as much growth in data or number of users as you need. Actian's unique pricing lets you budget with predictable costs in your operating expense line.
Like most things that work and work well, it is straightforward. We meet the market demand for affordable entry price points with the flexibility to easily extend and grow to take advantage of other Actian Analytics Platform capabilities. We free customers from the lock-in and expense of legacy vendors that cannot scale with growing data volumes, and we offer a full range of big data and Hadoop analytics capabilities (www.actian.com/products/analytics-platform/#HighestPerforming) that seamlessly support diverse analytics scenarios. And we keep it simple. That is revolutionary.
For the first time, businesses large and small are surrounded by an embarrassment of data riches, both from internal sources and from partners, public datasets, and customers. As the world becomes increasingly instrumented and the “Internet of things” proliferates, and as inexpensive big data repositories like Hadoop go mainstream, organizations that surface and act on insights that reside in these diverse datasets will win, and organizations that hesitate will be overtaken by the competition. Just look at what companies no longer exist or are struggling to survive as the result of disrupters like Google, Amazon, and Netflix. As Charles Darwin said, “It isn't the strongest nor the most intelligent species that survives, it's the one that is most adaptable to change.”
About the Author
Jim Hare is senior director of product marketing for the Actian Analytics Platform, helping organizations transform big data into business value. Prior to Actian, he was director of marketing at IBM, responsible for go-to-market strategy and messaging for the big data platform. Prior to joining IBM in 2008, Jim was vice president of product marketing and business development at Celequest, a California-based operational business intelligence vendor that was acquired by Cognos in 2007. He has over 16 years of experience in enterprise software, particularly in business intelligence, business process management, business activity monitoring, big data, and automated software testing & monitoring. Jim holds an MS in systems management from the University of Southern California and an undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Footnotes
Author Disclosure Statement
This column is sponsored by Actian. The views expressed are those of the company.