June 3, 2014 - Actian Corporation ("Actian") today announced that the Actian Analytics PlatformTM, the first end-to-end analytics platform built to run 100 percent natively in Hadoop, will deliver the highest performing, industrial grade, fully compliant SQL in Hadoop offering.
Combined with Actian's visual data flow framework, Actian's platform now makes Hadoop data repositories accessible to the entire enterprise by empowering millions of business-savvy SQL users and business analysts to conduct advanced analytics directly on data in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Companies investing in Hadoop now can broaden the scope of data discovery, increase the accuracy of decisions, and speed time to value.
"The world's highest performing companies have been using Hadoop to unleash transformational value from big data; however, access has been limited to a small group of data scientists. Actian has removed all major barriers to big data analytics on Hadoop - basically making Hadoop industrial strength"
Powered by Actian's patent-pending vector processing engine used by hundreds of customers, the platform unleashes the record-breaking capabilities of the X100 engine across every node of the massively scalable Hadoop architecture. The result is that Actian's platform performs up to 30 times faster than the nearest competitive offering while delivering fully industrialized capabilities that include business-critical security, complete ACID compliance, full SQL support, and libraries of analytics functions to make the entire analytic process more consumable and easier to manage. Additionally, the platform provides the only YARN Ready, end-to-end analytic processing natively in Hadoop and accelerates the full analytics process from data blending and enrichment to analytic computation and operational BI.
"The world's highest performing companies have been using Hadoop to unleash transformational value from big data; however, access has been limited to a small group of data scientists. Actian has removed all major barriers to big data analytics on Hadoop - basically making Hadoop industrial strength," said Steve Shine, CEO and president of Actian. "Other attempts at providing industry-grade SQL access to Hadoop have followed the path of offering either external 'add-ons' or building a new RDBMS from scratch within Hadoop - which will take many years and millions of dollars to reach full functionality. The Actian Analytics Platform now allows millions of business users to get fast answers and insights by providing turbocharged analytics and SQL in Hadoop without compromising security or data integrity. By tightly embedding our record-breaking SQL engine within every node of Hadoop, our platform transforms how customers will use Hadoop and delivers a solution that is years ahead of the competition."
Until now, business analysts and BI tools have been locked out of the big data lake because only a subset of SQL was supported in Hadoop. Some SQL queries would not run in Hadoop while others had to be completely rewritten due to incomplete SQL support. Actian's platform addresses this challenge by providing the broad SQL support that users demand from an enterprise-grade analytics database. The maturity of Actian's SQL environment also delivers industrial-strength DBMS security, encompassing users, roles, and authentication with ACID-compliant reliability. The Actian Analytics Platform gives data scientists and analysts powerful productivity and accuracy breakthroughs while making high-science analytics consumable, accessible, and re-usable.
"What better way to bring SQL to Hadoop than to extend an existing high-performance database to Hadoop, parallelize its operations, and surround it with a robust platform that supports native data ingestion and integration on Hadoop," said Wayne Eckerson, principal consultant at Eckerson Group, a BI/analytics research and consulting firm in Boston. "And surprise, the provider is Actian, an upstart data management company with established technology, deep pockets, and big ambitions to rocket to the top of the big data marketplace. The Actian Analytics Platform is going to raise eyebrows and capture customers."
"The YARN-based architecture of the Hortonworks Data Platform has given the industry a more direct path to Hadoop adoption, with an ecosystem that deeply integrates with existing and future technologies," said John Kreisa, vice president of strategic marketing at Hortonworks. "We are delighted to see that, with the addition of full-scale SQL in Hadoop functionality, Actian continues to build its Hadoop ecosystem capabilities with a YARN-certified analytics platform that delivers powerful performance and enterprise readiness. Hadoop gave the big data world an affordable repository for vast quantities of data, and now Actian makes that data accessible and actionable for maximum business impact."
Actian, a platinum sponsor of the 2014 Hadoop Summit (Booth #P6), June 3-5 in San Jose, will demonstrate the Actian Analytics Platform, which will be made generally available on June 30, 2014. This represents a major milestone in extending and enriching the Actian Analytics Platform announced earlier this year. The platform already has seen extensive use accelerating time to decision across a variety of customers and markets, including major innovators such as Evernote and Opera Solutions.
