Ingres Corp. has been rebranded as Actian Corporation and unveiled a new strategy to enable companies to develop Action Apps which it describes as lightweight, consumer-style applications that automate business actions triggered by real-time changes in data.
"The name change is symbolic of a completely new approach," Greg Wood, Actian CFO, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Ingres is becoming Actian to take action on big data, powered by VectorWise, the world's fastest data analytics engine."
According to Wood, "Today, enterprises spend $10 billion annually on BI software, yet it's not intuitive or easy-to-use, like modern consumer apps. Companies don't need additional BI charts, they need to be able to make insights on their data and take action. Actian's Action Apps correlate massive amounts of data from multiple sources in real-time to trigger the right action at the right time and produce results. They can tell a company its sales forecast changed or deliver a coupon to a customer's smart phone when they are 2 miles away from the company's store, encouraging customers to walk in and spend money."
According to Actian, Action Apps are easy to build, require no training and provide value far beyond traditional business intelligence applications. Action Apps will be developed, managed and shared on the Cloud Action Platform from Actian.
The company says developers will be able to use the Cloud Action Platform to create Action Apps in three steps: setting "Action Probes" to watch and analyze data from a variety of data sources; defining "Action Triggers" for priority data events and thresholds; and automatically delivering "Business Actions" when data events occur. A multi-channel retailer could develop a social-buying strategy to generate incremental revenue and compete with social couponing offers. The retailer would provide an Action App for consumers that enables them to choose products they want to monitor (the probes); set the price at which they would bid or buy (the triggers); and commit to a range of bids or automatic purchases if the price hits a certain threshold (the actions).
Today, says the company, custom Action Apps are being developed using the real-time insights gained from VectorWise, a data analytics engine. VectorWise will also be the foundational technology for developing Action Apps on the Cloud Action Platform.
Actian will continue to support the open source Community Edition Ingres Database, says Wood. As a company, Actian supports open standards, he noted, but new products such as VectorWise and the Cloud Action Server will not be open source.
To learn more about Actian and Action Apps, register for the New Era of Action Apps Webinar or visit www.actian.com.