Actian Launches New Data Observability Platform That Delivers Proactive Data Quality

Actian, the data division of HCLSoftware, have launched Actian Data Observability. This platform leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for comprehensive data quality monitoring. It also uses AI and ML for anomaly detection and resolution. By ensuring high data quality and trustworthiness, this new platform helps enterprises:

• Accelerate AI initiatives.
• Increase the speed of innovation.
• Reduce risk.

Traditional data quality approaches lack real-time capabilities and struggle to keep pace with the exponential growth in data volume and velocity. Actian Data Observability addresses these limitations, providing comprehensive and continuous monitoring across the entire data ecosystem. Gartner® statistics confirm the growing importance of data observability.

It points out: “By 2026, 50% of enterprises implementing distributed data architectures will have adopted data observability tools to improve visibility over the state of the data landscape, up from less than 20% in 2024.”¹

“Enterprises depend on data to power decisions, drive AI initiatives and meet regulatory demands—but too often face unreliable data, hidden quality issues, and ballooning cloud costs,” said Emma McGrattan, CTO at Actian. “Actian Data Observability gives teams the visibility and confidence they need to trust their data, reduce risk and control spend—turning data from a liability into a competitive advantage.”

A Platform Like No Other: Elevating AI with Actian Data Observability

Actian Data Observability is unlike reactive, rule-based approaches. This is so because it defines and runs thousands of data quality rules concurrently across the entire data landscape. Monitoring includes critical dimensions such as freshness, volume, schema drift, distribution patterns and custom business rules. ML-driven anomaly detection automatically identifies outliers, drifts and unexpected patterns. At the same time, it provides valuable root-cause analysis suggestions to facilitate faster resolution.

Actian Data Observability scales to connect any dataset in the ecosystem so enterprises can maintain data integrity without compromising performance or creating bottlenecks in their data pipelines. With this solution, Actian optimises cloud resource consumption without data sampling, ensuring predictable cloud costs and preventing unexpected cost surges.

Built for enterprises operating complex, high-volume modern data stacks, Actian Data Observability supports the following use cases:

• Data pipeline efficiency: Enable teams to quickly deliver reliable AI-ready data products and insights by addressing quality issues closer to the source and as early as possible in the lifecycle. This is made posible using the shift-left philosophy in data that prevents issues from propagating downstream.
• AI lifecycle monitoring: Ensure safety and compliance of AI applications by validating quality, freshness and relevance of training data and retrieval-augmented generation knowledge sources while enabling rapid intervention.
• Safe self-service analytics: Empower analysts and other consumers to independently assess reliability before using data with real-time health indicators directly embedded within data catalogs, BI tools and discovery platforms.

Integration with Data Cloud Warehouses and More

Built on an open architecture, Actian Data Observability integrates seamlessly with cloud data warehouses, data lakes, lakehouses and streaming platforms. By isolating data quality workloads from production infrastructure, Actian prevents performance degradation and impact to business operations in production environments.

For managing large analytical datasets, Actian provides a native Apache Iceberg integration to ensure accurate insights, quality checks and change tracking across systems. Additionally, to protect data security and privacy, Actian Data Observability accesses metadata and runs checks directly where data resides, eliminating the need for insecure or costly data copies.

Actian Data Observability will be available globally in June 2025 and will be available as part of the Actian Data Intelligence Platform in the fall of 2025. For more information, review the “Quality Data, Reliable AI: Introducing Actian Data Observability” and “How to Achieve Complete Data Observability–Without Breaking the Bank” white paper.