Actian Corp., an analytics platform provider, and AIR Worldwide, provider of risk modeling software and consulting services, now partnering to deliver risk-management analytics, the companies said.
AIR is using Actian’s Analytics Platform as the foundation and underlying back-end database for AIR’s Touchstone, a catastrophe modeling platform, which is intended to enable faster model run times and data-driven analytics for better catastrophe risk management, the companies said. With the Actian Matrix database now powering Touchstone, users will be able to ingest and analyze more sources of catastrophe and non-catastrophe data and to perform more advanced queries for larger catalogs at a higher resolution, according to the partners.
“Our customers need tools that empower them to own their risk,” said Peter Lewis, SVP at AIR Worldwide. “With the addition of higher-resolution models and ever larger data sets, risk modeling has become extremely compute-intensive. The Actian Matrix database gives us the ability to keep up with our clients’ evolving requirements and advance our analytics, enabling our customers to better own their catastrophe risk. Collaborating with Actian means our customers get access to scalable and high-performing big data analytics, all while leveraging their existing hardware investments and SQL skill sets.”
Actian says by distributing queries across multiple servers its massively parallel database can complete data-intensive operations many times faster than traditional databases housed on a single server. And, with Actian Matrix as the database, many performance bottlenecks imposed by serially processing data-intensive operations will be resolved. IT costs also will be reduced as a result because Actian Matrix runs on a cluster of inexpensive commodity hardware that can be scaled as data volumes grow, the companies said.
“Combining and analyzing traditional, social, mobile, and public data sources represent one of the biggest opportunities in decades, but yesterday’s approaches to data management and analytics can’t cope with the proliferation of sources and amounts of data at our disposal,” said Mike Hoskins, CTO at Actian. “Organizations that find ways to crunch massive amounts of data economically and derive actionable insights will win. Those that stick with yesterday’s technology will watch opportunities die on the vine or — worse yet — be crushed by their competition.”
