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Recent Advancements in Actian's Data Intelligence Platform

Actian, the data division of HCLSoftware, has announced substantial enhancements to its Actian Data Intelligence platform on June 25, 2025. These upgrades empower enterprises to ensure reliability and quality of their distributed data from the source. With the introduction of 'data contracts' and automation of data product creation, Actian aims to make trustworthy data widely accessible, establishing a robust foundation for data-driven projects while accelerating artificial intelligence initiatives.

Focus on Data Contracts and Governance

The core principle of Actian's 'data contract first' approach offers organizations complete visibility and control over their distributed data assets, from creation to consumption. Governance is embedded from the start of the data lifecycle in a process known as 'governance by design.' This approach is about shifting left—integrating data contracts and automated processes to ensure that data products created by specific domains are well-documented, user-friendly, and adhere to quality standards from the outset.

As businesses increasingly adopt distributed data architectures, a data product approach becomes essential. According to a report from ISG Software Research, it’s projected that by 2027, more than 60% of companies will adopt technologies that facilitate data delivery as a product.

Need for Strong Governance

Matt Aslett, Director of Research at ISG Software Research, emphasized the importance of robust quality and governance as enterprises embrace data products for self-service analytics. By embedding controls directly within data pipelines, Actian's Data Intelligence platform enables businesses to securely evolve towards democratization of data.

To address these requirements, the platform integrates data contracts directly into development workflows. This setup clarifies expectations, enforces compliance automatically, and identifies quality issues at the data source before they can propagate through the system. The outcome will be reliable AI results, reduced time to gain insights, minimized compliance risks, and decreased operational costs.

Simplifying Data Discovery

The Actian Data Intelligence platform facilitates data discovery by allowing each domain to publish its customized data products to an internal data marketplace accessible via the platform. Dedicated APIs ensure the automatic registration and updating of these data products within existing CI/CD pipelines, easing manual efforts and keeping data catalogs current.

Emma McGrattan, CTO at Actian, pointed out that managing data across decentralized environments poses challenges, particularly in maintaining quality and governance organization-wide. By making well-documented, high-quality data products easily accessible, the Actian Data Intelligence platform promotes data democratization and sharing culture, ensuring data reliability from source to consumption.

Decentralization and Collaboration

The platform supports decentralized data ownership, breaking down silos and fostering collaboration between business and technical users. With simplified discovery and consumption, business users can easily locate, understand, and utilize the data they require. The platform's contextual search engine, powered by a federated knowledge graph, presents relevant results while maintaining enterprise-wide compliance. Access request workflows ensure centralized and transparent approval processes, complete with full traceability.

To further enhance accessibility, Actian has introduced a new feature called Ask AI, an AI-driven natural language search engine, allowing users to query data using everyday phrases. This streamlines technical barriers and accelerates self-service analytics.

These new capabilities operate via federated metamodels while delivering comprehensive visibility into data traceability. When combined with Actian Data Observability, a new data observability solution, they ensure that data products comply with established contracts. By enriching well-defined assets with context, quality metrics, lineage, and usage data, organizations can better leverage their data for AI and various use cases.

Availability of New Features

The new features related to data contracts and products are immediately available within the Actian Data Intelligence platform, while the Ask AI functionality is currently in beta. For detailed information about these developments, readers are encouraged to check the blog titled "Data Contracts, AI Search, and More: Actian's Spring '25 Product Launch."

About Actian

Actian enables enterprises to manage and govern their data at scale confidently. Actian's data management and intelligence solutions streamline complex data environments and accelerate the provision of AI-ready data. Designed for flexibility, Actian's solutions integrate seamlessly and operate reliably across on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments. To learn more about Actian, the data division of HCLSoftware, visit actian.com.