We have recently joined the Google Enterprise Professional Program. Under this program, we have integrated the Google enterprise search appliance to our Solix ARCHIVEjinni (an information archiving product from Solix).

The integration is complete. Customers using this solution will be able to search across all data types (structured, semi-structured and unstructured) across both production and archived instances.

Solix has also achieved the status of a principal partner in the Sun Partner Advantage Program, for independent software vendors. Solix qualified for this level by meeting Sun’s criteria for excellence as a supplier of Solaris 10 OS — ready hardware and solutions.

How big a market is enterprise search? What are the key challenges in developing enterprise search tools?

According to IDC, enterprise search was a $900-million market in 2005 and is growing at 26% per annum. The need for rapid access to relevant and qualified information is driving a major effort to unify access and management of separate information sources — inside and outside customer organisations. This has made content management and search one of the most attractive markets.

Searches on Google, MSN throw up choices that may not be relevant. What developments are being made to improve the search experience?

The first development is to find a way to unify access to both data and content, that is, to implement a search engine that can federate access to multiple repositories, index multiple formats and bridge the information divide while leaving legacy applications in place.

Phrase identification and the ability to identify the names of people, places and things is another challenge that needs to be addressed. The solution to address such problems is strategic partnerships between search engine providers and data management solution providers.

How critical is enterprise e-mail archiving and documentation in the light of Sarbanes-Oxley and other compliance requirements? What opportunity does this provide to developers in India?

The growing size of e-mail data stores, coupled with the requirement to retain e-mail records for regulatory compliance and legal discovery, has created a big market for e-mail active archiving tools.

An e-mail active archiving product provides a searchable archive of all e-mail messages for a defined period of time. We have an eDiscovery module, which extends capabilities beyond search and can be used independently for e-mails or as part of a corporate records repository for legal and business uses. Solix is developing this eDiscovery module at its Hyderabad Development Centre.

What is your India strategy?

India is important for us as our hub for software development for global deployment, customer service to our worldwide customers and also as an emerging market for ILM (information life cycle management) solutions. Much of the SolixARCHIVEjinni solution was developed out of India. Many of the new extensions are continuing to get developed out of our Hyderabad centre.

Apart from e-mail archiving and documentation, are you looking at other areas? Also are there any other tie-ups like the one with Google?

We are working on extending our archiving product to vertical markets like financial services and telecom through partnerships with independent software vendors providing applications for these markets.

We are also extending our partnerships to resellers around the world and system integrators. We have also recently become an advanced level partner with IBM.