Actian can do it, but make sure you know what you want it to do, first.
February 28, 2019
Actian can do it, but make sure you know what you want it to do, first.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Actian Analytics Platform
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Oracle API Platform Cloud, TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe), Informatica Cloud, Informatica Enterprise Data Integration, Jitterbit and Qlik Sense
We didn’t actually choose Actian, it arrived as part of an acquisition, and really served its purpose both when it was used by the smaller firm we acquired as well as afterwards when we were extracting data and folding the company into our own data and analytics culture. The included hundreds of pre-built connectors gave us lots of options, but in the end, we were just too large of a company to rely on the product and needed a big-name player to address our wide-ranging needs. Powerful for its size, but not sized enough to address big businesses.