http://www.actian.com/ Actian’s strategy is to enable companies to develop Action Apps. Action Apps are lightweight consumer-style applications that automate business actions triggered by real-time changes in data. Action Apps will unleash the next level of business innovation and competitive advantage currently locked in the endless streams of data flowing through organizations and the industry. 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 world’s first Cloud Action PlatformTM from Actian. It is Time For Action Apps Over the past decade, most innovation in software has been in the consumer market. Think about the way you use technology in your personal life today. We all enjoy small, light-weight, big-value apps on the smartphones and tablets we love. These consumer apps help us do practical things like pay bills, book flights and taxis, and do fun things like connect and share with friends. It’s never been more effective and fun. Compare this to the experiences we have at work, where we are forced to use monolithic, hard-to-use, and harder-to-manage enterprise software. Actian’s mission is to enable users, developers, and Enterprise IT organizations to embrace and build consumer style apps to unleash a new level of enterprise productivity. Whether it’s monitoring a particular company’s stock prices, keeping tabs on your competition’s sales data, or watching your prospects’ credit ratings rise and fall, every Action App is customized to meet the information needs of your particular job or workflow. Action Apps are designed to constantly scan and probe a wide variety of disparate data sources, from highly structured corporate CRM and ERP systems to software-as-a-service offerings like salesforce.com, and even unpredicted unstructured twitter feeds, LinkedIn updates and Facebook posts. When the Action Apps data probes uncover important information, they fire triggers which signal the appropriate business user and either communicate, or cause an action to be taken as a result.

1. WHITE PAPER
Take Action on Big Data
With Action Apps
A WHITE PAPER FROM ACTIAN

2. WHITE PAPER
Take Action on Big Data With Action Apps
Contents
Executive Summary 3
The State of BI 4
Timing Problems 4
Management by Exception: Context is King 7
The Actian Strategy 8
It is Time For Action Apps 8
Action Apps Drive Action 9
Action Apps Benefits 10
What Are Action Apps and the Cloud
Action Platform? 11
How it Works 12

3. WHITE PAPER
Take Action on Big Data With Action Apps
Executive Summary
There is a great opportunity—and challenge—available in today’s fast-paced
world for a nimble and agile business to be able to react faster than its
competitors. Doing so will allow you to seize market share, increase revenue,
reduce costs, and produce more satisfied and engaged customers.
But the pace of change is relentless, and the deluge of data is only increasing (by 44-fold
by 2020, according to analysts IDC1). The problem of figuring out where the specific
opportunities lie for you in your market becomes one of gathering the large quantities
of data required, analyzing it effectively to turn it into useful insights, and then
acting on it.
The rewards for doing this effectively and efficiently could be huge. According to the 2011
McKinsey Global Institute Report “Big Data: The Next Frontier for innovation, competition,
and productivity,” taking action on big data can yield more than $2 trillion in business
value in economies as a whole. The report states that taking action can yield up to $300
billion in health-care value, 60% or greater increases in margin for the retailer, and up
to a 50% decrease in product development costs in manufacturing.
But business intelligence (BI) today is broken, in terms of the business benefits that
the $8-billion-per-year investment in this area has delivered. The value chain should
be simple:
But somewhere along the way, this chain is broken and the value never arrives.
What if you could take better decisions about where to focus your business, and rapidly
turn those decisions into actions? What if you could take those actions at the time they
would be most effective—as events are unfolding—instead of merely seeing them on a
chart after it’s too late to affect the outcome?
This paper explains why BI is not performing, and explains a new approach to the
problem of how to optimize your business to take advantage of market opportunities
and to minimize threats.
1
IDC: The Digital Universe Decade—Are You Ready? May 2010. 3

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Take Action on Big Data With Action Apps
The State of BI
Business intelligence is broken. Most people don’t get value out of the BI they already
have, because BI systems are just aimed at delivering insight, and insight is not enough.
You have to be able to take a decision and then act on that insight in order to get any
business value. BI systems today can’t do that.
The BI Survey #9 (http://www.bi-survey.com) from the Business Application Research
Center (BARC) confirmed that many of the major vendors of BI applications are rated
poorly by their customers for delivering business benefits. Also, that same survey
estimates that on average less than 15% of employees in companies have access to
BI tools. Another survey conducted by Actian Corporation found that even among the
people who do have access to the tools, most spend less than 5% of their time using
them. So even when you do gather intelligence, it’s not being used.
And yet, events happen every day that businesses should pay attention to—events that
are internal to the company, such as changes to sales and inventory data, and events that
are external to the company, such as the publication of competitor news and industry news.
The trouble is, many businesspeople are too busy fighting fires and dealing with day-to-
day concerns to keep a close watch on significant events that could present opportunities
or threats. The result is that opportunities get missed and threats that could be avoided
through early intervention turn into tomorrow’s fires.
Traditional business intelligence systems attempt to solve this problem in part by gathering
data about (mostly internal) activities and presenting that data in the form of lots of non
actionable charts and graphs and dashboards. But how many busy businesspeople take
the time to do a careful analysis of what those charts and graphs could tell them?
Timing Problems
In addition to this problem of information formatting and how to sort the wheat from the
chaff, there’s another problem: timing. Frequently, BI systems don’t describe the things
that are of the most interest anyway, because they quickly get out of date as the business
changes around them and the IT department doesn’t keep up.
Traditional BI is run by the clock—producing reports or dashboard updates to a fixed
schedule, perhaps hourly (if you’re lucky) but more likely daily, weekly, monthly, or even
quarterly. The data is often presented long after the event took place, leaving very little
time to do anything that can make an impact. You might be lucky enough, though, to have
a dashboard available on demand that refreshes with live data as soon as you ask it to,
giving a better handle on unfolding events.
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5. WHITE PAPER
Take Action on Big Data With Action Apps
But if you don’t ask, you don’t get, and if you’re like most of us, you’re usually too busy
fighting fires to take the time out to find the bookmark that will show your updated
dashboard.
Speed
However, even if you do get to your live dashboard, the BARC survey reported that one
of the biggest problems is that the things are just too slow. Business decision makers are
juggling too many different issues to be able to sit idly by, twiddling their thumbs while
waiting for a query to execute so that a graph can be drawn, or even to spend an hour or
two trawling through those graphs to figure out the nuggets of insight contained within
them. Results have to be fast and easy to consume, and they have to fit into your workflow.
In order for this to happen, calls to action need to reach you wherever you are, even if
you’re not sitting at your PC. The only way to deliver these calls to action is through a
mobile device. Morgan Stanley reports2 that the mobile internet is growing at 8 times
faster than the original PC-based internet did, and many decision makers in business
would rather lose a limb than their Blackberry or smartphone. Increasingly, all enterprise
IT systems will be available to mobile devices (sometimes to tablets instead of smart-
phones, for screen size reasons).
Current Data
But there’s another timing problem: how up-to-date is the data you are looking at?
Static reports can only, at best, produce a backward-looking view of what was happening
sometime in the past.
But that’s the best you can hope for. More often, the data is out of date because the
business has changed around a system that is unable to move fast enough to keep up.
There are various possible reasons why this might be the case:
› Your IT department might be understaffed, overworked, or generally doesn’t understand
the business issues well enough to know when a report or chart should be updated.
2
Morgan Stanley, Mobile Internet Report, December 2009.
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6. WHITE PAPER
Take Action on Big Data With Action Apps
› BI systems often require complex data models and software infrastructure. In order to
pull information out of transactional systems and be able to run a report in a reasonable
amount of time, star schemas and OLAP cube will often be invoked. These add no
business value, but take time and effort to set up and hence slow down the rate of
change. However, they are complex pieces of technology that have to be tended to by
a small number of skilled experts from IT, and McKinsey estimates that by 2018 the
demand for analytical talent in the US could be up to 60% greater than the supply.
› Business users don’t have enough direct influence and control over the systems and
support that they really need. Explaining your needs to someone else for them to write
down and misinterpret and have you fix again is a tedious process at best.
› Lots of current information is stored and analyzed in Microsoft Excel, because it’s the
only way savvy businesspeople can take control of their own destiny and get things
done at business speed, not IT speed. But these silos of information don’t make it easy
to pull together reports that cover multiple areas, because the spreadsheets have to be
emailed around from one desktop to another, and you’re often not certain if you have
the latest version.
The value of information declines over time. What you want is to look at current data that
represents the events that are taking place right now, but the only place where that exists is
in your ERP system, and once again, access to that is throttled and controlled so you can’t
quickly get what you need when you need it.
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Take Action on Big Data With Action Apps
Management by Exception: Context Is King
What you really need is to manage by exception. You want to know about the exceptions as
the events happen, so you can intervene and do something about it before it’s too late and
it becomes just another statistic on tomorrow’s graph or another fire to fight.
But to manage by exception, you need to be able to say what is exceptional and what is
routine, and doing that requires context. Context comes not just from looking at a single
data point, but taking into account other factors. How does this event relate to yesterday
or last week or last month? Is it in the top 10% of the normal range of values, for example?
Is this customer one of our biggest revenue earners? Do they have a contract renewal
coming up soon? Have they just had a credit rating downgrade? Are there takeover rumors
swirling? Have they just replaced their CEO? Have they just reported poor financial
numbers to the market?
To gather that context, you can’t just gaze inwardly, but you also have to look outward at
the world around you. These pieces of information exist out there in the world, but you
shouldn’t have to rely on a chance conversation in the hallway or an overheard snippet on
a news bulletin to put the pieces together. This process needs to be consistent, systematic,
comprehensive, and repeated—every day.
The other part of presenting information in context is that you have to make it easy to
consume. If you have to switch among several different apps in order to see the big picture,
that’s too much work and you probably won’t take in all the factors. The different sources
of data all need to be gathered together into one place for you, to minimize the context
switching that kills your train of thought and your productivity, and the result delivery needs
to be focused and succinct. You don’t want to have to spend a long time analyzing charts
and graphs to work out what’s going on; you want the information presented in a clear
and concise way that you can act on quickly.
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8. WHITE PAPER
Take Action on Big Data With Action Apps
The Actian Strategy
Actian’s strategy is to enable companies to develop Action Apps. Action Apps are light-
weight consumer-style applications that automate business actions triggered by real-time
changes in data.
Action Apps will unleash the next level of business innovation and competitive advantage
currently locked in the endless streams of data flowing through organizations and the
industry. Action Apps are easy to build, require no training and provide value far beyond
“Actian is turning big
traditional business intelligence applications. Action Apps will be developed, managed
data into big outcomes
and shared on the world’s first Cloud Action PlatformTM from Actian.
for our customers with
Action Apps. More than
It is Time For Action Apps
$8 billion a year is spent
on business intelligence Over the past decade, most innovation in software has been in the consumer market.
to generate piles of Think about the way you use technology in your personal life today. We all enjoy small,
historical reports and light-weight, big-value apps on the smartphones and tablets we love. These consumer
no action. Actian picks apps help us do practical things like pay bills, book flights and taxis, and do fun things
up where BI falls short like connect and share with friends. It’s never been more effective and fun.
by arming customers
to take instant actions Compare this to the experiences we have at work, where we are forced to use monolithic,
the second something hard-to-use, and harder-to-manage enterprise software. Actian’s mission is to enable users,
changes in their data.” developers, and Enterprise IT organizations to embrace and build consumer style apps to
unleash a new level of enterprise productivity.
– Steve Shine
CEO, Actian
Whether it’s monitoring a particular company’s stock prices, keeping tabs on your competi-
tion’s sales data, or watching your prospects’ credit ratings rise and fall, every Action App
is customized to meet the information needs of your particular job or workflow.
Action Apps are designed to constantly scan and probe a wide variety of disparate data
sources, from highly structured corporate CRM and ERP systems to software-as-a-service
offerings like salesforce.com, and even unpredicted unstructured twitter feeds, LinkedIn
updates and Facebook posts. When the Action Apps data probes uncover important
information, they fire triggers which signal the appropriate business user and either
communicate, or cause an action to be taken as a result.
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9. WHITE PAPER
Take Action on Big Data With Action Apps
Action Apps Drive Action
There are a lot of business opportunities and challenges that Action Apps can help solve.
Here are some examples:
Just-in-Time Discount Coupons
You are a multi-channel retailer executing a social-buying strategy to generate incremental
revenue and compete with social couponing offers. You provide an Action App for consum-
ers that enable 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).
Sales Management
You are a sales manager selling high-value products to other businesses. You want to keep
on top of the forecasts from your sales team, and make sure that you respond quickly if it
looks like something might upset your forecast. So you set up an Action App to watch your
list of top prospects (managed in Salesforce.com), match these companies up against a
stream of news reports and stock market updates, and then do some keyword lookups on
the news. You get alerted whenever one of your top 10 prospects by value for next quarter
issues any kind of statement that talks about results or profitability, or whenever there’s a
change in their executive team as reported on LinkedIn, or if they have a credit rating
drop. When this happens, you call up your Account Manager for that customer to work
out a response to the news.
Price Optimization
You are a retailer who wants to make sure that you are regularly updating your prices when-
ever your main competitors update theirs. You find a data provider to provide a feed of price
updates from these competitors, tagged with location data for the outlets that those prices
are available from. You take this data feed in real time and match it up with the prices you
are charging in your outlets that are nearby If the conclusion is that you need to change
your price, then you call another web service to action this change automatically.
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10. WHITE PAPER
Take Action on Big Data With Action Apps
Action Apps Benefits
Unlike traditional BI products that end-users find difficult to learn and use, Action Apps
are extremely user friendly:
› They operate like the consumer apps that business users interact with in their personal
lives, so the learning curve is virtually non-existent.
› They are supported on most popular devices including smart-phones and tablets,
as well as traditional laptops and desktops.
› A selection of pre-built apps will be available through an app store. Alternatively,
companies can choose to create customized Action Apps that address their unique
information needs and business workflows.
Key benefits of the Actian strategy:
› Providing you the information to act on insight into your data. Just insight is not enough
to get a business benefit.
› Ability to intervene “live” as the event is happening, not read about it in a report a week
after it’s all over.
› Controlling the solution, rather than waiting on IT for changes.
› Context from both public and private sources, which could be either structured or
unstructured, to be able to make good decisions and take the right actions.
› Accessing internal enterprise systems (e.g., SAP) and external data sources (e.g.,
Twitter or public geolocation services).
› Ability to filter out the routine data so you can focus just on the exceptions.
› Insight, context and action all accessible from a mobile device so you can take action
when it counts, not when it’s too late to matter.
› Easy to use. You can’t afford to spend large amounts of time figuring out how to use the
system or you’ll forget why you wanted to use it in the first place.
Action Apps and Actian’s Cloud Action Platform deliver on this vision.
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11. WHITE PAPER
Take Action on Big Data With Action Apps
What Are Action Apps and the Cloud Action Platform?
The Cloud Action Platform from Actian is a simple and efficient way to build small, easy-to-
use, consumer-style apps that can probe disparate data sets and trigger the right Action at
the right time.
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 “Business Actions” when data events occur
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Take Action on Big Data With Action Apps
The Cloud Action Platform provides all the design and runtime infrastructure that allows
an Action App to work. The platform takes input feeds from data probes (which are dispa-
rate data sources, both structured and unstructured data and both internal and external
data sources), and then reacts to conditions that you have selected by triggering the
Actions that you have specified. The collection of data probes, triggers, and actions
make up an Action App.
The Cloud Action Server is the enablement technology behind the Action Apps. Unlike a
traditional BI system, it is designed to make it simple for business users, not IT, to set up
the streams of information they want to watch, filter out irrelevant information, and then
take action on the important things that remain.
How it Works
The Cloud Action Platform takes data feeds from disparate data sources and organizes
them into ‘Data Domains’. These domains are logical groupings of all the information
sources relating to a particular area of interest. Data Domains can include both structured
and unstructured content, as well as internal and external data sources. Each Data Domain
has a Data Probe inserted into it to monitor one or more fields in the data source. The Data
Probes constantly scan data sources for specific, pre-defined data items. When particular
items are uncovered, triggers fire actions that take place in an Action App.
Today, custom Action Apps are being developed using the real-time insights gained from
VectorWise, the industry’s fastest data analytics engine. VectorWise will also be the founda-
tional technology for developing Action Apps on the Cloud Action Platform.
To find out how you can take advantage of Action Apps and the Cloud Action Platform,
please visit actian.com.
12

13. About Actian: Incite Action
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.
Actian Corporation Actian Europe Limited Actian Germany GmbH Actian France Actian Australia
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FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT ACTIAN@ACTIAN.COM
PS-415A
©2011 Actian Corporation. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Actian, Cloud Action Platform, Ingres, and VectorWise are trademarks of
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