Actian, one of the biggest private software companies in the world, is pursuing an aggressive acquisition strategy in an effort to stay ahead of the Big Data curve. Mike Hoskins, the firm’s chief technology officer, stopped by theCUBE last week to discuss his ambitious growth plans and the bleeding edge trends he’s been keeping track of.

In the last 12 months, Actian picked up data management specialist Pervasive Software, object database vendor Versant and ParAccel, an analytics startup with a cloud-based warehouse for compute intensive workloads. The service competes with offerings from HP Vertica, IBM Netezza and Teradata.

Hoskins says that ParAccel is the “keystone piece” of his firm’s vast analytics portfolio, which it recently extended with a new version of Pervasive’s DataFlow tool for machine learning and ETL processing. The release adds compatibility with YARN, an open source resource manager that facilitates non-MapReduce processing. The system is available alongside VectorWise, a single-node columnar analytics solution that holds multiple benchmark records for database performance.

Hoskins says that his company’s products make it possible to “move data at scale across your Hadoop cluster or any hardware and then deposit that data in whatever the optimal tier is for your downstream analytics,” noting that “it’s really for building a new generation of end-to-end data- and computation-intensive analytics.”

The next wave of business intelligence solutions will be forward-looking as opposed to backward-looking, the executive predicts. Rather than ingesting static data, these tools will tap into dynamic information streams to deliver actionable insights in a timely fashion.

“Between classic business transactions and social interactions and machine-generated observations, the digital data tap has been turned on and it will be turned off. The flow of data is everlasting. Which is why you see a lot of things in the loop around real time frameworks and streaming frameworks,” Hoskins observes.

Watch the video below for the exclusive interview.