Actian can do it, but make sure you know what you want it to do, first.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Actian was brought into our company via an acquisition, and turned out to be a nice little surprise. It was a smaller business with a lot of homegrown tools and various different database platforms, and they were using Actian to connect everything and export it to the cloud for analytics. It came in handy as we were going through the due diligence of the acquisition, and further helped us out afterwards as we extracted key data to blend into our own data repositories and BI tools. It is compartmentalized to just within the acquisition team and those of us leveraging the exported data.
Pros
- The support community was not as robust as you would find in a Mulesoft or Informatica environment. Given time and growth, it’s possible it will blossom, but for now it is minimal.
- Training is always a big thing for us, and the tool was not expansive enough for us to implement our own internal training program. There was some online training, and we acquired an expert when we brought on the new company, but some additional training tools would have helped the tool grown its user base internally.
- Not a lot to set it apart from the competition. Most of the features are available with other more established tools, but for a small company that maybe grew too quickly and needs to get its arms around many different data sources, I can see the appeal. Not really geared for larger firms.
Cons
- As I said before, more training or greater visibility to training tools/options would be a plus. It’s easy to publish YouTube videos these days, I think they should make more of them.
- Differentiation would help, there’s not a lot out there to drive you to buy the product if you are well informed in the market. If you know the market, you steer towards the large or trendy products. It’s a good product, but lost in the noise of the field I think.
- Hitching the wagon to a major software brand (like Mule did to Salesforce) would help grow the user base, and thus increase the activity in the support community. More users also translates into product champions.
Likelihood to Recommend
This is a tool geared for smaller to mid-sized business that has disparate sources of data from different platforms in varying incarnations. It’s a great ETL tool to solve the problems a scenario like that causes, but you can also achieve that with good BI Tools like Qlik Sense. So be careful that you really need an ETL tool, as opposed to an end-use tool with a built-in ETL component. If you are going ELT and have a lot of data an not a lot of corporate resources, this is a better option than Microsoft or Informatica.
