Actian, the data division of HCLSoftware, is announcing a series of new improvements to the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, a unified platform for organizing, governing, and sharing data. The platform’s latest enhancements place an emphasis on embedded governance, ensuring data trust from source to consumption and cultivating a robust foundation for AI initiatives.
This update centers Actian’s “data contract first approach,” which embeds governance early in the data lifecycle. Data contracts—or a way to reduce the complexities of distributed data systems while linking data quality, data observability, and data democratization—ensure that data products, created by individual domains, remain trustworthy, governed, and reusable as they move through pipelines.
With a data contract, which acts as “a formal agreement between data producers and data consumers that creates accountability and trust between them,” Actian “establishes these agreements upfront—before the data product is developed. Agreeing exactly what is to be delivered, the format, the quality, and the terms for use, greatly improves the confidence and trust in the data product,” explained Emma McGrattan, CTO at Actian.
Greater trust in the data product facilitates more reliable AI outcomes, faster time-to-insight, lower compliance risk, and reduced operational costs, according to Actian.
Actian’s update also improves data discovery, enabling individual domains to publish tailored data products into the enterprise data marketplace within the Actian Data Intelligence Platform. Paired with dedicated APIs that automatically register and update data products within CI/CD pipelines, users benefit from reduced manual effort and fresh data catalogs.
By supporting decentralized ownership, the Actian Data Intelligence Platform streamlines the innate complexities of modern data estates by powering intuitive data discovery and consumption. This is further amplified by Actian’s federated knowledge graph-powered search engine, which supplies organizations with contextual results without sacrificing compliance.
“These updates to the Actian Data Intelligence Platform connect data engineers, governance leads, and business users in a way that makes sense, scales across the enterprise, and allows us to improve data democratization,” said McGrattan. “Specifically, data contracts and active metadata enable teams across the enterprise to speak the same language about data, trust the data they are using, and automate complex, time-consuming data management tasks.”
“At Actian, we don’t see governance as a compliance checkbox, but as a catalyst and enabler for innovation. That means making it federated where teams own the data that they know best while following universal corporate-wide standards. It should also be automated to maintain speed and integrated into every layer of data management,” McGrattan added.
To learn more about the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, please visit https://www.actian.com/.