transforming big data into business value

WHITE PAPER

Transforming Big Data into Business Value

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WHITE PAPERTransforming Big Data into Business Value

Contents

Overview 3

Introduction 3

The Age of Data 4

Universal Use of Analytics 5

A New IT Landscape 5

The Challenges 6

Enabling the Action-Driven Enterprise 6

Two New Platforms: Connect, Analyze, Act 7

Invisible Integration:

Actian DataCloud Platform 7

Unconstrained Analytics:

ParAccel Big Data Analytics Platform 8

Actian ParAccel Big Data Analytics Platform Use Cases 10

Conclusion 11


3

overview

We live in the Age of Data. It is imperative, now more than ever, that organizations harness the power of data, the information that runs in and around their corporate entity and the bits and bytes that are in fact the very lifeblood of businesses today. Without the ability to connect, analyze – and act on data, organizations will not succeed long-term. The winners will be those companies that deploy technology to run sophisticated analytics on massive amounts of data and take action to capitalize on their data.

This white paper sets out to explain the challenges and opportunities that businesses face in today’s Age of Data and how they can turn big data into business value.

introduction

Big Data. These two words mean different things to different people, and yet, regardless of what they mean to you, you cannot escape the fact that we are firmly ensconced in the Age of Data. Data is generated by more devices than ever before and flows constantly through more systems every single day. In the last two years we have generated more data than in the history of mankind. And yet, that pales in significance when you consider that data is expected to double in size every two years through 2020, exceeding 40 zettabytes (40 trillion gigabytes), which is the equivalent of 5,200GB of data for every man, woman and child on Earth.

Why and how is this important to businesses? In the Age of Data, our ability to connect emerging data, analyze it at scale, and take action in real-time means the difference between winning and losing. For companies to guarantee future growth and success, it is imperative that they implement a technology approach today that will help them gain and sustain a competitive advantage over time.

Just as you would expect a commercial entity to harness the Internet in its business model – an idea that changed the landscape and our lives in less than a decade – now the same applies for organizations that intend to make the most of data. In fact, the Age of Data is set to have the same kind of profound change on how business is done. We are already seeing how organizations that harness data are leaving those that don’t in the dust.

Recently Actian brought together some of the world’s most advanced technologies that have been built from the ground up to transform big data into business value by enabling organizations to connect various data sources together, analyze growing combinations of data, and then take action on insights gleaned.


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The Age of Data

The Internet, sensors, monitors, apps and the new “social media” paradigm are all generating massive amounts of data, more than we have ever seen before. What has changed? Data used to be stored in data centers, now it is everywhere. Data used to be stored in static conditions, now it’s in motion. Today, data is born digitally and it flows constantly; the data valve has been turned on and will never be turned off.

In fact, data is now omnipresent. As it emerges from three key areas, it overwhelms traditional technology and presents us with a tremendous opportunity. These three key areas are:

› Digital data and the Internet: A new wave of smart sensors and monitors connected to the Internet have spawned everything digital – digital logistics, digital oil fields, digital hospitals, smart grids, smart meters, smart cars, smart appliances – all producing trillions of time-stamped, location-based events every single day.

› Behavioral data and the sprawl of apps: A new wave of apps has created massive volumes of behavioral data tracking every move of their users: Web apps, mobile apps, gaming, and smart devices for everything from health to athletics, shopping, amusement, law enforcement and mining. Discovering patterns in behavior can lead to pinpoint accuracy for both prediction and prevention strategies.

› Conversational data and the new paradigm of social media: The social media phenomenon with Facebook, Twitter and other sharing media have created a new paradigm that elevates the relationship and conversations that take place in communi-ties. The new paradigm heightens the importance of conversations everywhere from intelligence operations to retail organizations, from medical facilities to data centers. The conversation about data can sometimes be more valuable than the data itself.

Data ubiquity – three fast-growing types of data sources

Digital Behavioral Social


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Universal Use of Analytics

In addition to the new IT landscape and exponentially growing data volumes, Moore’s law has taken compute power to a point where sophisticated analytics are showing up all over the place: on desktops, in databases, in business processes, in chips and especially in places like complex supply chains and digital marketing optimization engines.

Algorithms run on their own preventing fraud and deterring risk. Analysts use them every day to determine the right strategy for their organizations. In fact, algorithms are everywhere.

The value of analytics has pushed these algorithms mainstream, opening the door for everyone from the data scientist to the business analyst to thrive in the world of new analytics easily and affordably. Businesses are realizing the benefits that analytics and fast answers to questions can produce. In particular, analytics allow organizations to:

› Discover what can’t be seen with human observation in order to take action on a new opportunity or avoid impending risk

› Predict what is most likely to happen and respond favorably

› Prevent something detrimental from happening

› Prescribe the next best action or next best offer

A new iT landscape

At the same time that data is being generated and begins flowing through our businesses, the IT industry has moved from mainframe through client server and the web to third generation commoditization of infrastructure as delivered by the likes of Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook. Indeed, data-centric and data-intensive companies are flocking to the cloud, and SaaS offerings are quickly passing up traditional software applications with fast-growing user adoption. This growth is being driven by three things:

› Consumerization of IT: No matter how unrealistic or impossible it may be, line of business users expect and demand a simple, instantaneous “one-click” experience. Organizations must deliver a fast, frictionless experience

› Ultra-complexity of infrastructure: Trillions of transactions, billions of users and millions of apps all running on a mix of commodity infrastructure have complicated the management of infrastructure beyond manual capabilities


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› Technology-driven competition: “Deploy or die” has become the mantra of industry leaders. Deploying modern technology to gain a competitive advantage is no longer optional

The Challenges

In order to gain and maintain a competitive edge, organizations must take advantage of data integration, analytics and cloud technology in order to succeed. However, there are three major challenges keeping them from winning in the Age of Data:

› Traditional integration approaches don’t scale to meet the complexity and real-time need to combine data at rest with data in motion, or to combine data on-premises with data in the cloud

› The explosion of emerging data and new analytics makes it impossible for legacy technology to scale and perform to meet the analytic demands that inform real-time action. In today’s world, there is no single platform to handle all of the different workloads necessary to extract value from data

› Traditional data center delivery strategies are too complex to manage the explosion of data, apps, and analytics running on commodity hardware. Companies are flocking to cloud and SaaS as a solution to their challenges

enabling the Action-Driven enterprise

Responding to the call from businesses to be able to sync their data, make sense of it and then turn it into business outcomes that drive their organizations forward, Actian has been busy developing technology platforms that help them tackle these issues.

Actian helps clients transform big data into big value by enabling them to address the challenges and opportunities brought on by the Age of Data and the emergence of new analytics. Furthermore, Actian offers the quickest time to analytic value with a modular approach that integrates data assets behind the scenes and scales without limits.


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Actian delivers a comprehensive suite of solutions that allows businesses to connect various data types together, analyze them at incredibly fast speeds and then take action on them to gain a competitive advantage in the market.

› Connect: connect seamlessly with invisible integration across millions of data sources on-premise or in the cloud

› Analyze: analyze anything with unconstrained analytics across entire ecosystems of data, users and applications

› Act: automate action with real-time intelligence for anyone in the office or on the move

Two new Platforms: Connect, Analyze, Act

Invisible Integration: Actian DataCloud Platform


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The Actian DataCloud Platform offers fast, scalable data integration both on-premises and in the cloud. The platform provides a single place for companies to easily access, connect and manage the totality of their business data.

Furthermore, the platform empowers companies to combine freely available data and unstructured Hadoop data with their highly governed internal data to see a new picture, analyze it and then act upon insight gained.

Most importantly, it abstracts the complexities of data integration, offering an easy-to-use interface suitable for line of business users.

The platform delivers invisible integration with a high-performance, behind the scenes data provisioning engine so that organizations can use combined data sets to get a complete picture of every angle of every business process. In particular, it lets organizations:

› Choose data services from a storefront of pre-integrated mixes of data sources designed to meet specific business requirements

› Leverage a comprehensive Integration Suite to manage the lifecycle of any data

› Benefit from full app-to-app connectivity and integration

› Use a cloud integration hub for SaaS applications

Unconstrained Analytics: ParAccel Big Data Analytics PlatformBuilt from the ground up to run high-performance analytics on massive amounts of data, the Actian ParAccel Big Data Analytics Platform delivers unconstrained analytics to everyone from the individual analyst to the army of analysts supporting major organizations. Without constraints, anyone can access the data they need, enrich the data for deeper meaning and run high performance analytics at the real-time speed of business. Whether you need to lay the foundation for enterprise analytics or accelerate time to analytic value for a single application, the ParAccel Platform is the right choice for the Age of Data.

The ParAccel Platform allows companies to think outside the box when it comes to analytic applications. The highest performing analytic platform combined with the most comprehensive set of analytic capabilities opens a new world of possibilities. Specifically, the platform:


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› Delivers unconstrained analytics with a real-time, high performance platform so that companies both large and small can prescribe the next best action, prevent damage to their business and discover hidden risk and opportunities

› Extracts analytic value from data at any place along the data journey, helping companies create business opportunity, drive business momentum and sustain competitive advantage

› Shares both data and processes on-demand providing connectivity with other data sources like data warehouses, Hadoop, streaming data sources and machine data

Actian’s ParAccel Platform enables organization to take the right action on big data. With the most cooperative analytic processing and the most flexible deployment options in the industry, organizations are already leveraging the Age of Data to do the following:

› Deploy a powerful analytics engine for the continuous growth of an ecosystem of data sources, data platforms, data scientists, big data analysts and analytic applications

› Scale without limits for massive amounts of data, emerging data types, high-volume analytics, sophisticated analytics and massive populations

› Speed the delivery of analytics with complete solutions for data provisioning, data discovery, data enrichment, high performance business intelligence, discovery and predictive analytics and intelligent, action-oriented applications

› Choose from libraries of analytics and open the world of analytics to both data and business analysts and quickly deploy a wide range of analytic applications


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Actian ParAccel Big Data Analytics Platform Use Cases

The ParAccel Platform has many use cases that prove how it helps organizations turn their businesses into action-enabled enterprises. Winning companies are utilizing unconstrained analytics to do the following:

› Analyze customer profiles from 76 percent of the American population and data from 300 million daily searches, including 50,000 user attributes

› Run fraud analytics across 440,000 ATMs, supporting 95 million cards and over 2 million POS locations

› Run digital marketing algorithms against more than 1 billion transactions every day

› Recalculate 10,000 customer segments, with 50,000 user attributes, 20 times a day and deliver more than 300 million ad recommendations

› Run matching algorithms against more than 2.5 billion records multiple times per day

› Run a 46-hour Oracle market basket analysis query in just 30 seconds

› Build a 7-hour Oracle shrink processing report in just 1 minute and 15 seconds

› Load data at a rate of 160 TB per hour, or 2.66 TB per minute

› Transform and load ticker data at a rate of 2.5 million records per second to provide the freshest information possible

› Spin up a 42GB analytic mart with 866 million rows and 8 tables in just 1 minute and 8 seconds


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Conclusion

Today we are witnessing the start of a new era. After 40 years of focus on hardware and software, we are now firmly ensconced in the Age of Data. In the near future, maintaining a competitive edge will come from exploring new ways to ingest growing torrents of data from a myriad of sources, using advanced analytics to isolate meaningful correlations and patterns in near real-time and prompting business actions that deliver value based on those insights.

For more information about the Actian DataCloud Platform and the Actian ParAccel Big Data Analytics Platform, go to http://www.actian.com.

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transforming big data into business value

Technology

digital data

data centers

conversational data

data ubiquity

emerging data

gb of data

power of data

data valve