Actian Offers New Detail on Action Apps and the Need for Them

Nov. 29, 2011 - PRLog -- Actian Corporation (formerly Ingres Corp.), today announced the results of a survey it commissioned to give a realistic picture of how Business Intelligence (BI) is perceived as well as its usage patterns within large enterprises. The results show that users want more intuitive, mobile and actionable BI and Big Data Analytics. In addition, Actian is releasing a white paper by Robin Bloor, Ph.D. of The Bloor Group that reveals details of the technology architecture designed to deliver them.

The worldwide survey, carried out by Actian, polled 918 organizations. Respondents included BI power users, managers and executives, 74 percent of which have BI implementations. The poll found that 76 percent of respondents with BI solutions available to them recorded use at just five percent of their time or less.

Users cited a range of reasons for lack of use, including non-intuitive design, a mismatch of output data to business needs as well as the inability to take action based on reports. In addition, 69 percent of respondents wanted access to BI on their mobile devices, claiming that such functionality would be useful or very useful. More than three quarters (76.2 percent) wanted users to have the ability to set event triggers based on real time data analytics – something that to date has not been available, especially within the confines of the enterprise.

"These results will come as no surprise to anyone who has worked in the data analytics space over the past couple of years," said Steve Shine, CEO, Actian. "Our customers regularly report on the stagnation of BI, as well as an inability to keep pace with the consumer technology that users enjoy in their personal lives. As data management becomes one of the key opportunities for companies to create competitive differentiation, Actian is connecting the gap between big data analytics and consumer style apps to bring action to BI."

Actian's Cloud Action Platform and Action Apps
In September, Actian announced plans to launch a Cloud Action Platform to make it easy for any business user to create Action Apps – lightweight consumer-like applications that automate business actions from insights and real-time changes in data. Using the Action Methodology™ Developers will be able to use the Cloud Action Platform to create Action Apps in three easy steps:

Set "Action Probes" to watch and analyze data from a variety of data sources
Define "Action Triggers" for priority data events and thresholds
Automatically deliver "Actions" when events occur
"Actian's Cloud Action Platform and Action Apps have the potential to change the way BI and Big Data Analytics applications are deployed," said Robin Bloor, Ph.D. and founder of The Bloor Group. "These products target BI users in their specific context and can provide automated reactions."

According to Bloor's white paper, Actian closes the gap between insight and action in a way that allows BI users to set automated actions for discoveries in the vast amount of data that simply passes by without being leveraged by an organization. Today, business opportunities are simply missed because insights gained from data could not be put into action quickly enough.

In addition, mobile computing offers a huge opportunity for the Cloud Action Platform. While most current BI tools aren't built to incorporate data from mobile devices or interact with them, Actian's technology will make it possible to know the users's context and provide an appropriate response. For example, a doctor using an iPad could be automatically provided with a specific patient's entire medical chart, including medical history, imaging and treatment details just as they enter the patient's room.

Build Action Apps Today
The Cloud Action Platform can be deployed both as a SaaS environment hosted in a public cloud, and also for deployment on a customer's own premises in a private cloud. This flexibility provides for very rapid adoption while still delivering security and performance to meet a wide range of business needs.

Many Action Apps will need to trigger probes from existing Enterprise systems, so Actian has created a robust, four-stage, Action Methodology™ for delivering this integration rapidly, building on its extensive data management and system integration experience. Use of this method, together with the pre-built components contained within the platform and virtual elimination of custom coding for many scenarios delivers an incredibly rapid Return on Investment.

The whole service emphasizes record-breaking speed. The BI capabilities that the service embodies enable the analysis of large amounts of data, including social media data. New actions can be developed quickly, because the developer can be the person who needs/discovers the business insight that is to be acted upon. Additionally the whole platform is built to execute automated actions quickly and reliably.

The paper recommends that companies who implement the Cloud Action Platform and Action Apps look for opportunities within the company's operations that might be altered to make the most of the service. According to Bloor, "it is a technology that can change the way an organization works."

To download a copy of the Bloor White Paper, go to http://info.ingres.com/g/?RWZMYO8TWD.

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Actian Corporation (formerly Ingres Corp.) is the first to unveil a cloud development platform for building Action Apps. Action Apps are lightweight consumer-style applications that automate business actions triggered by real-time changes in data. Actian products incite action at more than 10,000 customers worldwide by driving their mission critical workloads and providing rapid action insights to their data. Actian is headquartered in Redwood City, California with offices in New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Melbourne.