Mike Hoskins, Actian CTO, joined theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante to kick-off the first day of Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California. Having spent $150 million dollars to acquire assets, Actian has assembled all of the next generation IPs into a single analytics platform, allowing users a level of flexibility in data interaction that competitors have not been able to match. Hoskins, Furrier and Vellante discuss what makes Actian’s platform unique and how the young company became the world’s fastest database, trumping Microsoft and Oracle.

“What would a database look like written from scratch now?” Hoskins suggests that major players have yet to address this seemingly obvious question as well as Actian. Key to Actian’s success over companies with similar offerings is modern software including the implementation of peak ram, vector processing and other key components. Hoskins says Actian’s “next generation compression and advanced techniques” have been “devastating to traditional players in the industry.”

Evernote and OfficeMax have had great success using Actian. Like many other companies, they use the platform to drive business growth and sales. Evernote clients wanted to know how best to convert free users into paid users. Metrics in classic Hadoop alone were inefficient to address this, but Evernote did have success using Actian’s matrix database. OfficeMax saved money using the platform by significantly reducing the amount of time spent on analytic workloads using Actian’s fast technology.

Hoskins also describes the importance of data flow saying: “The digital data tap has been turned on and will never be turned off.” Simply put, architectures must be more streaming oriented. As IT teams and CIOs aim to eliminate fraud and maximize revenue optimization, they must be able to push their data through Hadoop pipelines.

Going forward, Furrier asks about the importance of data fusion for Actian. Hoskins responds “data fusion is front and center in our analysis.” Actian users can pull data from multiple sources and correlate that data across multiple dimensions. Then, as Hoskins explains, “If I know these immutable dimensions, then I can fuse the data in a consistent view of that data so it can flow down the analytic pipeline.”

The discussants end their talk by discussing the future and importance of modern architecture. Hoskins concludes: “We need new solution architectures and new platforms…let’s let these outcomes be driven by key business goals [like] fraud detection, risk minimization, customer retention and growth.”