Actian Partners with Databricks to Extend Data Visibility and Governance Across Ecosystems

Integration bridges gap between technical teams and business users; enables more users to transform data into business value

ROUND ROCK, Texas, June 3, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Actian, the data division of HCLSoftware, today announces a partnership with Databricks, the data and AI company, to integrate the Actian Data Intelligence Platform with Unity Catalog, Databricks' unified and open governance solution. The partnership simplifies data access and data discovery while strengthening governance in this Actian solution, which enables more users to turn data into business value.

Making data accessible and understandable to everyone who needs it, regardless of technical expertise, remains a critical challenge for most enterprises today because information is isolated in data silos, creating limited visibility across the organization. In fact, a Forrester survey found 46% of respondents did not know or were uncertain about where to find information.

"In today's complex enterprise environments, data that fuels AI and analytics rarely lives in a single system—that's not a barrier, it's an opportunity," said Emma McGrattan, CTO at Actian. "By integrating with Unity Catalog, the Actian Data Intelligence Platform enables organizations to discover and leverage distributed data assets wherever they reside. This unified, insight-driven approach accelerates innovation, reduces time to value, and provides teams with confidence in their data."

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform connects and contextualizes data from various platforms, cloud applications and on-premises systems to provide a comprehensive view of an organization's data ecosystem. With the new integration, enterprises can seamlessly extract metadata from Unity Catalog into this Actian platform to extend data visibility and governance across all data sources.

Actian's powerful federated knowledge graph delivers search results that connect technical data elements with descriptions and business context to deliver meaningful and actionable data insights. Technical and business users can easily explore available datasets and request access in Actian's governed, self-service enterprise data marketplace so they spend less time searching for information and more time leveraging data to create critical insights.

"As the leading Finnish media company, it is important that we deliver relevant content to our audiences and trusted insights to our advertisers," said Mikko Eskola, Data Director at Sanoma Media Finland. The integration between the Actian Data Intelligence Platform and Databricks Unity Catalog enables us to find and access data across our organization enabling us to remain competitive, innovate, and effectively serve audiences and advertisers."

The Actian and Databricks integration accommodates a number of business-critical use cases:

• Regulatory compliance: Minimize compliance penalties through automated monitoring, streamline reporting with audit-ready data trails, and reduce time spent preparing documentation.
• Self-serve analytics: Expand business-led analytics adoption across departments, empower non-technical stakeholders to make data-driven decisions, decrease IT backlog for analytics requests, and save time with intuitive user interfaces.
• AI-ready data foundation: Shorten data preparation time for ML-model deployment, enhance model accuracy with higher quality data, accelerate implementation of new AI use cases, increase success of AI initiatives from concept to production, and generate value through AI-powered automation and insights.

When combined with Actian Data Observability, organizations gain complete, real-time visibility across all data without the need for sampling. By leveraging Databricks compute to extract full data sets, profile and score data, this integration eliminates blind spots and enables a full shift-left approach. Actian's proactive methodology ensures that users can detect quality issues, assess their impact, and maintain control over remediation efforts.

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform integration with Databricks Unity Catalog is available today for download from the Actian documentation site. More information is available in the technical documentation online.

About Actian

Actian empowers enterprises to confidently manage and govern data at scale. Actian data management and data intelligence solutions help streamline complex data environments and accelerate the delivery of AI-ready data. Designed to be flexible, Actian solutions integrate seamlessly and perform reliably across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments. Learn more about Actian, the data division of HCLSoftware, at actian.com.

¹ Forrester blog, Your Data Culture Is DOA, Kim Herrington, November 21, 2023.

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SOURCE Actian