Actian Embeds Data Quality Controls into Development Pipelines
As enterprises increasingly struggle with data quality issues in distributed architectures, Actian has unveiled significant enhancements to its Data Intelligence Platform that promise to transform how organizations ensure data trustworthiness from creation to consumption.
The HCLSoftware subsidiary announced that its platform now embeds data contracts directly into development workflows, implementing what the company calls a "data contract first" principle designed to catch quality issues at their source before they cascade through AI and analytics systems.
Industry research firm ISG Software Research predicts that by 2027, more than 60% of enterprises will adopt technologies to deliver data as a product – a shift that demands more sophisticated governance approaches than traditional centralized data management.
"The challenge of decentralized environments isn't just managing data across domains – it's ensuring quality and governance at scale," said Emma McGrattan, Actian's Chief Technology Officer. The new approach aims to solve this by building governance controls directly into data pipelines rather than treating them as an afterthought.
The enhancements tackle a growing enterprise pain point: maintaining data quality and governance across distributed architectures where individual business domains create their own data products. Under traditional approaches, quality issues often aren't discovered until data reaches downstream consumers, creating costly remediation cycles and undermining trust in AI initiatives.
Actian's solution automates much of this process by requiring data contracts – formal agreements defining data structure, quality standards, and usage terms – to be established before data products are created. These contracts are then enforced automatically through the development lifecycle.
"By incorporating these controls directly into data pipelines, the Actian Data Intelligence Platform is designed to enable enterprises to scale to data democratization safely," noted Matt Aslett, Director of Research, Analytics and Data at ISG Software Research.
New Capabilities Target Self-Service Analytics
The platform updates include several features designed to make data more accessible to business users while maintaining governance standards. A new enterprise data marketplace allows domains to publish their data products with dedicated APIs that automatically register and update catalogues within existing CI/CD pipelines.
Perhaps most significantly for non-technical users, Actian has introduced "Ask AI," a natural language query capability currently in private preview. The feature allows users to search for data using everyday language, with results ranked according to organizational glossaries and business context.
The platform also incorporates a federated knowledge graph-powered search engine designed to deliver context-aware results while maintaining compliance across the enterprise. Access request workflows provide centralized approval processes with audit trails.