Ingres renames to reflect new focus on apps

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 22 September 2011 16:29

IT Industry - Strategy

Database vendor Ingres is renaming itself Actian. While its DBMS activity continues, the company is looking to a new market for apps driven by massive databases.

Actian officials stress there will be no changes to its Ingres and VectorWise database business, but the change in name reflects a new activity - a platform that can combine massive databases with publicly available feeds (such as Twitter or Facebook) to drive lightweight, easy to use apps, especially in the BI area.

These Action Apps perform three functions. A Probe selects the data, a Trigger determines whether the data means action should be taken, and an Action, well, an Action takes action. An SDK will be provided for developers.

To keep Action Apps simple, most of the work is done by Actian's VestorWise based Cloud Action Platform. The Platform will be offered as a public or private cloud service, and will combine big databases with live external feeds.

One example given by company officials is that an Action App could watch trading sites and public forums for changes in sentiment towards a company, and then execute stock market trades that reflect that change.

"Actian is turning big data into big outcomes for our customers with Action Apps," said Steve Shine. "More than $8 billion a year is spent on business intelligence to generate piles of historical reports and no action. Actian picks up where BI falls short by arming customers to take instant actions the second something changes in their data."

Page 2: "The next evolution in IT."