Solix Technologies today is the only independent pure play Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) tools vendor in the market, and indeed has been so for several years. Our competition is not from other entrepreneurial software vendors but from some of the largest companies in the industry – IBM, Hewlett-Packard & Informatica – each many times our size in overall resources. On paper at least we are the sole David facing three Goliaths.

Yet despite this disparity in overall size, Solix has more than 150 customers who use our technology to manage their data and that is the heart of their organizations. And we are advancing into the era of Big Data and Cloud and new tools to meet new challenges.

So how do we manage this? Recently the editor of ceo2ceos.com asked me exactly that question – how can we continue to compete against these giants, and what is my advice for aspiring entrepreneurs who want to use new ideas and approaches to take on established players?

The interesting fact about our competition is that they do not attempt to compete against us based on technical superiority. Rather they cite their greater size and spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) about our viability. The fact is Solix has been in business since 2002 and has weathered tough economic times, which economists rate as the worst financial disaster to befall the United States since September 1929. Through it all, while other companies cut back, we maintained our staff, customer service level, and development schedule. Today Solix remains financially stable, with a bright future ahead.

To answer the editor’s first question, I said that this continued success is based on three legs:

1. Engineering Focus – We maintain best-of-breed status in the industry with a constant focus on and investment in building a great technology. Our constant goal is to be the technology leader in ILM.
2. Marketing by our customers – Our answer to our competition is let our customers speak for us. We have many happy customers such as Honeywell, Duke Energy, American Tire Distributors, who are happy to participate in joint webinars and customer case studies. We further closely work with them on the latest developments and direction and to hear what they need. We use that feedback for our future product direction.
3. Partnerships – We are continuing to invest on our relationship with our partners, including our OEM relationship with Oracle Financial Services, and we have more such partnerships in the works that will help us expand our presence in the market.

This strategy works. My advice to other entrepreneurs is to dream big and invest in realizing those dreams in terms of developing innovative, superior technology and strong communications with their customers and prospects. Listen to what they need and let that guide your development direction.

We wish our customers, partners and employees wonderful Holidays.

The world population has reached 7 billion and is heading towards 9 billion by 2050. But the story is more complex than that single sentence implies. Population demographics are changing. The internal population of the first world, excluding naturalized citizens and resident aliens, is level or in some cases shrinking, and some countries, such as Germany, are creating incentives for population growth. In contrast, much of Africa and Asia, excluding Japan, are experiencing huge growth. Barring some unforeseen major shift, experts expect India, which presently has the second largest population, to pass China in 2025. Another implication of these trends is the impact on both culture and religion. Worldwide for instance, the populations of certain religions are growing lot faster than other; needless to say, this will have an impact on our geo-politics. Further, the ratio of men to women is also changing worldwide as many third-world cultures prefer male children.

Perhaps the most important implications of this news is that the amount of basic resources – food, water both for personal use and agriculture, and energy in particular – are being strained by the continued population growth. Both China and India, for instance, are tapping deep, antique aquifers that do not refill to support increased agriculture to feed their populations. When those inevitably run out, they will need to find a replacement water source or face a decrease in food production, which has negative implications for supporting their population. Every additional individual will require the production of more food, water, and energy, which will generate increased waste and pollution, further escalating the struggle over natural resources and space.

This is also the year of increasingly extreme weather conditions, widespread drought, enormous forest fires, and especially historic rainfall and flooding. This year has seen unusual flooding throughout the world including the Mississippi Valley in the United States, Queensland in Australia, and currently ongoing in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand. These exacerbating conditions will further impact our productivity and put more strain on the system.

The bottom line: We have to do more with less. We need to further educate our youth on population growth problems and on the need to establish a balance between population and the resources available. The solutions will always lie in empowering youth to make the right decisions. We need to explore sea water purification to increase the water supply for agriculture and personal use, solar and wind power to supplement and eventually replace more polluting forms of power generation. In my recent trip to UC Denver, saw their Solar Powered Light Bulb Invention. This is great, as bulk of third world countries still use fuel for light. This is perfect example for doing more with less; we need more of this to handle the population growth.

Solix is all about efficiency, do more with less, organizing data, optimizing CPU, memory, storage, and therefore energy usage. This has an impact on the entire infrastructure in data centers or cloud – (i.e) network, hardware and software resources and of course on backup/recovery operations.

Our prospects often ask why should they should select Solix when major players like IBM and HP also offer information lifetime management (ILM) products that duplicate many of the basic features of our product. The answer is that we are singularly focused on ILM, both in terms of service and advanced development. IBM and HP are certainly good companies, but for them ILM is a minor part of their overall product set. ILM customers of IBM and HP will never get attention from the company CEO (unless they are also major users of many other products from those companies). And while these companies certainly have vast resources compared to Solix, those are not focused primarily on their ILM products but rather on their larger product sets. As a result small vendors tend to provide more advanced, best-of-breed products, and that certainly is true of Solix.

Unfortunately the normal vendor selection process fails to recognize these advantages. It is generally remains mired in bureaucratic processes. RFPs fail to differentiate among mature products or identify innovators. They usually are based on requirements that buyers can envision now, often missing the vision for the future. Their feature lists look quite similar to capabilities that vendors can deliver in current releases rather than more visionary features that don’t exist in many products today. The result: Newer, innovative products don’t get considered often citing viability and track-record concerns.

Leaving aside the questions of whether HP’s recent reorganization is good or bad for HP, we can derive several specific lessons from HP’s recent announcements that apply to the question of small vendors in the marketplace:

1. Small vendors are often eliminated from consideration as suppliers based on long-term viability concerns. HP’s sudden decision to kill its webOS-based products including both its new tablets and Palm smartphones just weeks after announcing those tablets and making public statements about its commitment to competing in the tablet market, however, show that big vendors can simply shut down whole product sets without warning. How would you feel if your company had made a commitment to those webOS tablets based on HP’s overall relationship with your company, its size and stability, and its assurances from high level executives of its long-term commitment to that technology?
2. Large companies traditionally have problems keeping up with the leading edge in technology innovation in part because their very size creates inertia. Innovation in large companies, as HP has demonstrated, often focuses on major business moves such as HP’s announcement that it will sell its entire PC division and get out of the PC business while moving into software by acquiring Autonomy. Customers of HP desktops and laptops have to wonder who their supplier will be next year.
3. Small companies with a precise focus often are less vulnerable. Japanese car companies were smaller when they started, but they brought in a new design philosophy and better technology at lower cost. Because they never had manufactured big, high-performance but gas-guzzling, overhead-cam engines, they were free to introduce new, more economical, engine technologies. They are forced to differentiate through innovation. Another example, Tesla has created the first really practical electric car in terms of overall performance, forcing the larger companies to embrace electric power. And the customers of those small companies benefit from that innovative spirit, not just today but into the future. A small vendor with one product set is totally committed to that product for its survival and needs to keep innovating on that platform to stay ahead of the competition and maintain its differentiation.

The overall lesson here is that vendor size does not guarantee stability of a specific product. A small vendor that is focused on a vital product will be closer to its customers and understand their needs for that product better. It will put more effort into meeting those needs, including those that the customers themselves may not understand, because its entire organization from top to bottom is focused on that product and on how it best fits into the overall IT ecosystem. It will provide excellent service because every customer is vital to it. And it will not suddenly abandon its core product set for something entirely new.

Here is a case study of one of our customer, how they used Solix EDMS Test Data Management tool set to automate the creation of subsets of production databases for test and development, increasing productivity, saving money, and improving security.

We recently completed an engagement with a large Public Sector customer based in Washington DC, working with an Oracle EBusiness Suite, a 16 TB database. We were able to automate the creation of data subsets for test and development and the resulting database size is 1% (180 GB to be precise) of that database while meeting the requirements of the test environment. This means we saved 99% storage and depending on the number of copies, the storage savings could be significant. If you further consider the savings in backup, and CPU use, along with associated energy and cooling, the overall savings is substantial. And smaller the dataset, faster to load, backup, and restore, and requires fewer hardware resources overall. This also improves security, as this data subset contains lesser data than fully operational database, further sensitive data has been masked by Solix EDMS Data Masking.

An adequate test database must contain data that meets the needs of the selected test cases in sufficient quantity to meet the test requirements. And to test an application correctly, the test environment must match the production system as closely as possible and it must meet the needs of development, testing & training environments, each of which may have a different level of requirements. Determining how much data and what data for each environment, manually is complicated and time consuming, and IT staff lacks the time, many shops simply clone their entire production database for tests and end up creating data breach situations like what Sony is currently facing.

Test Instances for other than for load testing, can work with smaller subsets. In this case, for instance, using a clone of the entire 16 TB database would create tremendous delays in testing. Just loading the full database would take significantly longer than the subset Solix created, and then each test that involved processing the data would be similarly time-consuming. And it would require essentially a full duplicate of the hardware in the production environment, starting with enough storage to hold the 16 TB database. Studies show that 60% of application development and testing time is devoted to data-related tasks that, at best, have only a peripheral relationship to the applications actually being tested. All of this time, and the extra resources required by the full database, are wasted, therefore.

IT organizations looking for ways to improve productivity need to attack this problem. The best answer is to use an automated tool set to capture test data requirements and create a subset of the production database that meets test needs while minimizing the size of the test database. And that toolset should also allow you to mask sensitive data in the dataset, to provide the highest level of security to that data. This is exactly what the Solix EDMS tool set does. Here is a case, where one of the largest data centers with one of the most popular enterprise application is using Solix EDMS Test Data Management.

Today’s enterprise data centers are bloated, out of control, stuffed with extra servers, storage, and networking devices maintained at great expense to meet the requirements of maximum loads that only happen for a few days a month or one month out of the year. As a result, they use much more power, cooling, and space than IT can afford in this era of limited resources and soaring energy costs. The data center of tomorrow needs to be more flexible and efficient, use less space and power, and be easier to manage and scale.

To get there, analysts predict enterprises will focus their infrastructure spend on virtualization, data center consolidation, and data center migration in 2011, while the leading organizations are already moving into private and hybrid public/private cloud architectures.

We see major benefits for enterprises and medium-sized companies in building a hybrid cloud architecture on top of a virtualized data center environment. Chief among those are:

• Shifting costs from capex to opex by moving part of the data center to the public cloud, thus freeing scarce capital for more important investments.
• Optimizing human capital and IT resources by focusing internal resources on critical applications and data while moving more peripheral operations either to SaaS providers or public cloud infrastructure provided by companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
• Consolidating the data center by facilitating resource sharing through a private cloud infrastructure sized to support normal operations while drawing on public cloud infrastructure when needed to meet high demand. This will reduce operating costs such as power and cooling, maintenance, and administration as well as capex investments while increasing SLA compliance.
• Transferring risk particularly for maintaining high availability during high demand periods and mis-estimating work loads, from internal IT to the cloud service provider.
• Ensuring availability at lower cost by increasing flexibility with an architecture that automates shifting resources to meet increased demands both by reallocating internal compute, storage, and network resources and drawing on public cloud resources as required.

Creating a successful hybrid cloud architecture, however, takes some thought. The basic question that must be answered is which applications and data should be retained in-house and which should be entrusted to the public cloud.

Our recommendations are:

1. Move active applications to a private cloud: According to Gartner, private cloud computing is gaining interest among large enterprises, with investments in private clouds increasing steadily through 2014. The biggest beneficiary will be the end-customer, as the growth of private cloud changes the relationship between the customer and the IT organization. Metrics will be based on service delivery. This will not necessarily be an easy change. It will require management support, process changes, funding changes, service standardization, and most important, changes in culture. But the advantages in increased resource utilization, savings in both capex and opex, and increased flexibility to meet demand changes, will more than pay for the investment.
2. Move semi-active applications to public cloud: Applications/data that are less active and perhaps read-only, with lower SLAs that will not be impacted by access through the Web, and that have lower security needs, are candidates for public cloud platforms like Amazon EC3 and Microsoft Azure.
3. Move inactive data to Solix ExAPPS: Moving inactive, historic data to either the public or private cloud only increases your cost, since you are paying by GB/CPU, while providing little benefit, since this data is rarely if ever used. The better strategy is to retire this data using Solix ExAPPS, which automates the process based on customizable business rules while keeping the data available in a secure, read-only environment that meets compliance requirements for business data preservation.

Solix EDMS and Solix ExAPPS can help you create your Datacenter of Tomorrow

I recently attended Gartner Expo, where Gartner’s experts discussed the top 10 technologies and trends they believe will be strategic for most organizations in 2011. What picked my interest are the following and the impact Solix EDMS can have on them:

Cloud Computing: Cloud computing services exist along a spectrum from open (public) to closed (private). The next three years will see the delivery of a range of cloud service approaches that fall between these two extremes. Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor’s public cloud service technologies (software and/or hardware) and methodologies (i.e., best practices to build and run the service) in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer’s enterprise, much as Google does today with Gmail.

At Solix, we are seeing increased trends from prospects who want to buy Data Management as a service. Solix ExAPPS, Industry’s first application retirement appliance, is seeing a lot of demand, with this surge. I won’t be surprised to see the majority of the IT purchases being done as a cloud service in couple of years.

Next Generation Analytics: The leading edge here is real-time simulations and models that predict future outcomes to support individual business decisions, rather than just analysis of results of past actions after the fact. While this may require significant changes to existing operational and business intelligence infrastructure, it promises significant improvements in business results.

Information Lifecycle Management has an important role to play in identifying and moving inactive data to lower storage tiers. This allows these demanding new predictive analytical tools to focus on the most important active data rather than being bogged down in a morass of irrelevant historical information that does not apply to the present and future business environment.

Storage Class Memory: Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment, and other embedded IT systems. In business, flash memory offers the best of RAM and very high speed storage with a list of advantages of its own — space, heat, performance, and ruggedness among them. As a replacement for RAM, flash offers equivalent performance but with the huge advantage that flash memory is persistent in a power outage, so that when power is restored the device starts up immediately where it left off. This makes it a new, premium choice that allows you basically to store the most valuable, most active data in permanent memory rather than out on a disk drive, where it is instantly available but protected from crashes. Flash is already being used as a “Tier 0” in applications, primarily in the financial industry, that demand extremely fast reads and writes of large amounts of sensitive data.

The disadvantage is cost. It will continue to have enough of a premium for the next several years to make flash an impractical choice for storing anything but the most high-leveraged data, with the rest getting archived or retired. A strong ILM environment with effective data tiering will be important for realizing maximum advantage from your flash memory investment.

According to Goldman Sachs, over last decade the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India & China) made their mark on the global economic landscape, accounting for more than a third of world GDP growth. In the process their economies have grown from one-sixth to almost a quarter of the world economy. And this may only be the start. In “Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050″, Goldman predicts that these four rising economic powerhouses will continue their strong growth and their combined economic wealth will exceed that of the G6 (U.S., U.K., Italy, France, Germany and Japan) by year 2040.

We have been working on expanding our footprint to BRIC nations and Japan. Our goal was to access second and third largest economies of the world, besides the fastest growing nations. As part of that effort, I happened to meet Merrily Kautt, who teaches at the University of Colorado-Denver Business School. She was looking for a real-life business research project for one of her International Marketing classes. We were happy to accept when she offered to have her class research on how to expand the Solix footprint to China and Japan. The result was an impressive report combining social, cultural, political, and historical aspects of these countries, culminating in practical guidance on how to do business with them. The students did an excellent presentation to our senior management, which among other things convinced us to hire two of them for our business development team.

This research also contributed to the launch of our operations in China (www.solixchina.com) last month with the opening of a Chinese support center. At the same time, we acquired our first Japanese customer through one of our global partner, the kind of expansion we always wanted.

If you are a SI/Reseller with infrastructure offering in growing economies, partner with us. According to Gartner, Enterprise information archiving (EIA) will become a key infrastructure component for Enterprises by 2013. Our partner programs are designed to help you extend your business to this high growth market.

As the BP oil spill continues to blacken waters in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond, Lloyd’s of London, the world’s largest insurer has estimated total claims from the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig could run into multiple billions. In the Louisiana wetlands, the oil has find ways around the protective booms to reach wild cane fields, discoloring the base of green cane and fouling the air with a horrendous smell. Pictures of pelicans covered in oil and dead dolphins on oil-fouled beaches are circulating on the Web. A third of the Gulf has been closed to fishing, and tourists are staying away from the beaches. And almost forgotten in the news – 11 oil workers were killed in the explosion.

Newly released internal documents show BP PLC estimated 4.2 million gallons of oil a day could gush from a damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico, if all equipment restricting the flow were removed. Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey released documents showing BP estimates that in the worst-case scenario the leak could gush between 2.3 million and 4.2 million gallons of oil per day. The current worst-case estimate of what’s leaking is 2.5 million gallons a day.

BP has lost 65% of its market value, has established a $20 billion disaster fund, is spending billions more trying to deal with the emergency and may face bankruptcy before the emergency is over. And all because it skimped on safety equipment and did not plan for a disaster that was inevitable at some time, in some place, given the amount of drilling the company is doing.

What IT managers can learn from this ?

Disasters can happen in many ways, be it natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, or earthquakes or man-made disasters such as hazardous material spills, infrastructure failures, and terrorism. The central role of information technology in business-critical functions, combined with the transition to an around-the-clock economy, has made protecting an organization’s applications and IT infrastructure in the event of a disruptive situation a vital business priority. Of companies that experience a major loss of business data, 43% never reopen, 51% close within two years, and only 6% survive long-term. Driven in part by these grim statistics, most large companies spend 2% to 4% of their IT budget on disaster recovery planning to avoid much larger potential losses in a disaster.

When IT discusses disaster recovery, usually the first thought is off-site data backups. That of course is a vital strategy. But many organizations constantly battle with overly-long data backups that exceed their windows, and when they test their recovery plan they are dismayed at the time it takes to reload those central business databases. In an economy where time is money, these are costly problems.

So how can you reduce backup windows and the time required to restore vital transactional databases in the event of a disaster. The answer is to reduce the size of those production applications by archiving inactive data and secondly, decommissioning/retiring applications that are inactive and no longer needed for day-to-day business activities. According to industry analysts, 80% of the data in large corporate databases is no longer needed to support day-to-day business and 10% of the applications in an unoptimized portfolio are candidates for Application Retirement. So how do you remove these unneeded data/applications from data center while preserving it for research and compliance? The answers are

• Database Archiving – reduce the size of production applications
• Application Retirement – reduce the infrastructure, meaning fewer servers and databases

that need to be restored at all.

Clearly the “next big thing” in the data center is virtualization. But we believe that IT shops that virtualize wholesale, without first retiring applications that they no longer need using tools like Solix EDMS or Solix ExAPPS, are missing a large chunk of the potential ROI.

The real benefits of virtualization are the substantial energy, cooling, and space savings, which have allowed organizations to extend the lives of data centers for extra decades. The big offenders in the data center are underutilized servers. An idle server uses 60%-70% of its maximum power and cooling requirements. Thus by raising server utilization from the 15% rate typical in pre-virtualized environments to the 85% rate normally seen in virtualized systems, the CIO can eliminate many of the boxes on the floor, cutting power and cooling demand while making room for future growth.

But virtualizing software that the organization no longer needs is not the best answer for those applications, and actually can make them harder to identify as they get lost in the overall virtualized environment. Often these obsolescent applications are forgotten and only found when someone does a systematic audit of what is running on each server or blade in the data center.

How important is this? Gartner estimates that 10% of the applications in an unoptimized portfolio are candidates for retirement while an additional 33% are candidates for migration or rationalization. Why? All applications eventually outlive their usefulness. Business needs and processes change, new technologies supplant old ones, the enterprise buys new divisions with duplicate processes running on different software. But those old applications are often never shut down. Users still need access to data, some users prefer the old application, others find that it is better for one or two lingering tasks.

Virtualizing these obsolescent applications still leaves them using up valuable resources and costing the enterprise money in software licensing and maintenance, support costs, and associated personnel. The better answer is to use application portfolio management (APM) to identify these candidates for oblivion and retire them first. This can have a major impact on resource use even after virtualization, maximizing ROI. And APM then can become the basis of managing the applications environment in a more sophisticated matter going forward — for instance by identifying applications that might be replaced by SaaS and those that should not be virtualized at all.

The problem, of course, is what happens to the data. And the solution is Solix ExAPPS, which relocates the data from retired applications with its full metadata into its repository with almost 90% compression and makes that data available to authorized users through a single viewer, replacing multiple large applications with a single, efficient tool, taking the ROI for virtualization to the max.

With U.S. unemployment at 10%, and another 6% under-employed in part time jobs, plus another 9% who have moved overseas (many back to their home countries), we continue to be in a tough economy. But people and businesses are slowly regaining confidence in the stability of the economy. While there is evidence that IT budgets will increase this year over last, IT needs to be careful about every penny it spends.

One of the biggest drains on IT budgets is the class of obsolescent, duplicate, and unneeded applications that remain running in many data centers. Gartner, for instance, estimates that 10% of applications in un-optimized data centers are eligible for retirement. Retiring these apps can pay tremendous dividends both in savings, by freeing staff for more important assignments, eliminating licensing and maintenance fees, and freeing servers and storage systems either for reassignment or retirement, and by making room for better, more modern replacement.

Typically this has been addressed by SI or ILM vendors who specialize in the vagaries of decommissioning legacy applications and systems. Their value proposition is based on software/services that enable enterprises to continue to have access to historical or decommissioned data without having to incur the expenses of licensing, running and supporting the legacy application or system, including Cloud computing alternatives where appropriate. The data management side of application retirement is a complex issue that can turn a retirement into an expensive consulting project. One problem has been that few comprehensive tool sets have been available until recently, and most of those have been designed to support consultants rather than to automate full retirement processes. Cloud offering, hasn’t yet been a successful delivery model, as many are still hesitant because of the security and privacy concerns.

About a year back, we decided to explore Appliance as a deployment option because of the positive impact it can have on implementation times, costs, return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO). Our goal – Enable Application Retirement with least risk and a rapid return on investment (ROI) and simplify the decision making process for customer. Well, here we are with our product  Solix ExAPPS, Industry’s first Application Retirement Appliance – an integrated set of hardware, storage and software components – Database with Massive Compression capabilities (almost 90% data compression), Application Server and pre-configured Application Retirement engine while providing data access to standard Reporting Tools – all bundled into a single device. Customers can plug Solix ExAPPS into a network port and power it up to have industry’s first and only pre-configured Application Retirement solution.

Please check out the following links …

Solix ExAPPS – Press Release
Solix ExAPPS – Data sheet
Solix ExAPPS – White Paper

Finally, let me wish you a belated but heart-felt Happy New Year with the hope that Solix can help you achieve your business goals for the years ahead…

Last week I met Chris Martin and Mick Dawson, who rowed from Japan to North America, setting a new world record, rowing 5,100 miles in 189 days, more than a month than their planned 150 days without giving up. Imagine spending six months rowing, day-in and day-out with only a single companion who is asleep much of the time you are awake — they took turns, one rowing while the other slept – out in the open ocean with no sight of land. This is an epic journey on a par with the greatest adventures of history.

On the way they overcame tremendous challenges – typhoons and tropical storms, and winds and currents that blew them off their planned course and cost them days at sea, thick fog that reduced visibility to a few yards for days. And perhaps the biggest challenge, dodging huge ocean-going freighters and tankers that they encountered in the commercial shipping lane they traveled. Small boats are very difficult to spot from the bridge of a large ship out in the open ocean, and large ships are notoriously difficult to maneuver quickly if the boat is spotted.

While listening to them talk about their experiences, what amazed me was their determination, precise planning, belief in themselves and the tightly knit team effort. It got me thinking how their experience was in some ways similar to Solix journey. I am often asked how tiny Solix can compete and continue to win against industry giants like IBM and HP. Like Martin and Dawson, we are a small boat competing with some of the biggest in the industry, but just like the two yachtsmen, we have key advantages:

• Innovation – Like their shipping lane, our market provides room to maneuver out of the way and keep ahead of the supertankers – in our case through continuous innovation. The rapid data growth being faced by datacenters and the challenges it imposes, gives us a huge opportunity to innovate and develop better answers to customer challenges.
• Passion – Our passion is to delight customers. That is the cornerstone of our foundation.
• Belief – We believe we are the best and we can continue to deliver excellence – the best technology to solve the customer problems and at the least cost.
• Focus – We maintain a tight focus on our market and the needs of our customers. Keeping our eye on our goal is vital to our continued success.
• Determination – We are determined to succeed. We are driven by our passion to meet and exceed customer needs and expectations and offer them advantages the competition cannot, regardless of the amount of effort required.

Martin and Dawson faced an incredible challenge. No one had ever rowed across the North Pacific before; many would say it was foolhardy to try. But they proved it could be done. Like them, Solix is facing the challenge not just of surviving in a challenging market beset with financial storms, but of excelling. And we are meeting that challenge with innovation, passion, belief, focus and determination. Few of our customers we signed recently, have indeed migrated from our competition that alone proves the point.

Happy Holidays !!

It is October, and for Oracle users and industry watchers that means Oracle OpenWorld Conference 2009. In recent years Oracle has become a power in the IT industry with its acquisition spree and most recently Sun Microsystems. One of the major questions on everyone’s mind is what will Larry Ellison announce at the Moscone Center this year.

Every year Oracle OpenWorld is the stage for at least one major Oracle announcement. Three years ago, it was Oracle’s move on Linux support and then the next year, the move on to Virtualization Software. Last year it was the HP/Oracle Appliance offering — a massive parallel processing computer for data warehousing. What will it be this year, could it be any surprise on Java or Salesforce.com (Marc Benioff is doing a keynote at Oracle Open World).

What Oracle really needs is a positive announcement about Oracle Fusion Applications (OFA), its much promised and delayed next generation ERP/CRM system built on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform and delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS), originally announced in 2006 (as “already half finished”) and now promised for 2010.

Oracle’s promise at this initial announcement was to “be the first company on the planet to build a full suite of applications for large and small companies based on standards.” Fusion Apps will combine the best functionality from its ERP/CRM systems (Oracle Applications, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel) built on a new, advanced technology base, with a new user interface, new process model, and new data model. Oracle’s unified application platform going forward, a new generation of service-oriented, Web 2.0-based applications is to have business intelligence integrated as a pervasive element and be designed to integrate easily into SOA architectures. It will make a clear shift from application silos to supporting end-to-end business processes.

Oracle critics have raised questions about when exactly Oracle will introduce Fusion Apps., and whether the new platform will be enough when it does arrive. The strongest reply to these questions would be the announcement of a market launch date or at least a positive progress report.

However, even when OFA does arrive, it will present serious challenges for users. One of the largest of these will be data migration from present generation applications to a new and as yet not publicly defined database structure. Data migrations are fraught with issues, often exceed timelines and budgets, and can create challenges to application migration acceptance. Understanding exactly what needs to be migrated and determining the rules for mapping to the target environment will require significant time and effort. Best practice is to ensure that the scope of the initiative is limited to data sources that will be required or that add value to the target application or data structures. Just because data sources related to the target are available does not mean there is business value in migrating them. Often, not all historical data needs to be migrated to the target. By archiving or disposing of older, non-value-added data, the level of effort and timeframes can be minimized.

For most organizations, the lack of concern about, and clear understanding of, the magnitude of data quality issues will create problems. In many cases, substantial amounts of rework will be required to address data quality issues encountered during the development of the migration processes. Again, the more data involved in the migration, the more likely, more numerous, and more severe these problems will be.

ILM software such as Solix EDMS can play a vital role in preparing for the massive data migration that moving to Fusion Apps will require, and the time to think about that is now, before the migration begins. The purpose of ILM software is to identify data no longer in active use and archive it out of the production database automatically, in an organized manner that preserves access to that data when it is needed. The obverse of that coin is that it also identifies the subset of data that is active and that therefore needs to be migrated. By reducing the size of the production databases that will be migrated, it can reduce the time, effort, and number of data quality issues that will be involved, while preserving access to the archived data through its own or other industry-standard data viewers.

As with everything involving very large business databases containing vital business information, however, ILM cannot be installed, implemented and run in a day. As the deadline approaches for the introduction of Fusion Apps, this means that Oracle’s several hundred thousand enterprise customers should seriously consider ILM now. This will give them time to select a product, install and test it, and then start a gradual archiving process for their major databases that will leave only the active data in the production database when the time comes to migrate to Fusion Apps. That will give them a major head start on migration, and the good news is that in the meantime archiving with a strong ILM tool such as Solix EDMS will improve the performance of their present architecture while delaying and decreasing Capex expenditures on expensive Tier 0 and Tier 1 storage systems.

Cloud computing is widely seen as the new wave, the next big thing, and the realization of a vision of computing as a utility like electricity, delivered out of a plug in the wall and billed based on how much you use. From inside the industry it can be either a promise or a threat. Like it or not, however, it will be a reality.

What is Cloud Computing?

Gartner defines cloud computing as “a style of computing in which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ using Internet technologies to multiple external customers.”

In general, everything in computing seems to be getting the as-a-service tail.

Why Cloud

Cloud computing offers several major advantages to users,

• First, it avoids capital expenditure (CapEx) on IT.
• Second, consumption is usually billed on a utility (e.g. resources consumed, like electricity) or subscription (e.g. time based, like a newspaper) basis with little or no upfront cost, eliminating all the complexity of trying to predict what the organization will need three years hence.
• Third, the organization does not need to recruit, pay, and retain people with sometimes rare skills that have nothing to do with the core business.
• Fourth, it gives the business huge flexibility to respond very quickly to business changes compared to the months that it takes to purchase and install a new server and sometimes years to implement an ERP system.
• Fifth, cloud service vendors also can provide a level of disaster recovery capability that many businesses simply cannot afford to build into their internal systems, simply by the nature of the Cloud.

Other benefits of this time sharing style approach are low barriers to entry, shared infrastructure and costs, low management overhead, and immediate access to a broad range of applications. Users can generally terminate the contract at any time (thereby avoiding return on investment risk and uncertainty) and the services are often covered by service level agreements (SLAs) with financial penalties

The Buzz

Forrester Research advises CFOs to take a close look at cloud computing for messaging and collaboration and enterprise applications. Gartner Says Cloud Computing Will Be As Influential As E-business. Gartner also says that cloud computing is very much an evolving concept that will take many years to fully mature.

Issues with Cloud

The first of these to surface in most conversations is data security and loss of control over data. The second is quality-of-service (QoS), including network latency issues. Hence while the buzz is there, Enterprises are slow in embracing the Cloud initiative.

How Solix EDMS helps Enterprises launch into Cloud

Solix offers several products that have direct application to Cloud Computing:

• Solix EDMS Data Masking can provide much greater security by masking the sensitive data as it leaves the organization to go to the Cloud and then unmasking that data as it is retrieved. This ensures that data can only be read by authorized individuals and not by hackers on the Web or dishonest employees of the Cloud service provider.
• Solix EDMS Data Archiving can improve network latency by archiving off the least active data and improving the application performance, potentially that can offset the network latency time lag.
• Solix EDMS Application Retirement can be the first Enterprises should target by relocating least business active data to the cloud. With this, they can start evaluating the cloud offering and analyze the benefits of cloud with least business risk. Reviewing application portfolio can help Enterprises identify underperforming or redundant systems where maintenance outweighs business value. By retiring these applications, companies can optimize their portfolio, reducing cost and risk. Application Retirement is removing a system, application, database or platform from service, while retaining access to the business-critical data. Solix EDMS Application Retirement provides this vital data management functionality of relocating and making the business-critical data available via Cloud offering.

Overall, Enterprise Data Management is an important part of the planning in any move from the data center to the Cloud. If issues related to Cloud are not tackled before the cut-over to new Cloud services, that can undermine the advantages of the Cloud and in extreme cases, force the organization to return to its older, more expensive internal environment. Well, we have lot to do, exciting times ahead…

Have you ever tried riding a bicycle with under-inflated tires? It’s hard for the human engine to push it ahead. Pump it up; it seems like you’re gliding on air. Well the same is true for your car, and we are wasting so much fuel as a nation running cars with underinflated tires and badly tuned engines that President Obama talked about it during the election campaign.

How bad is this problem? In 2005 students at Carnegie Mellon University checked the tire pressure on 81 cars parked on campus. They only found one vehicle with properly inflated tires. The rest were under-inflated by an average of 20%. At that time gasoline was $3 per gallon, close to the price today, and the students calculated that each of those 80 drivers would save $432 per year based on typical driving just by inflating their tires to the manufacturer’s recommended pressure and this does not include the decrease in tire wear and resulting savings in fewer blowouts.

According to, fueleconomy.gov the gas savings for having a properly tuned car is 16 cents per gallon. The savings from properly inflated tires varies, but the site says 1% of fuel economy is lost for every 2 psi of under inflation. Fixing a car that is noticeably out of tune or has failed an emissions test can improve its gas mileage by an average of 4%, although results vary based on the kind of repair and how well it is done. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at least a quarter of drivers are cruising around on under-inflated tires. The Rubber Manufacturers Association, Auto Club, California Highway Patrol and Yokohama Tire Company used those statistics, along with Department of Transportation and Automobile Association of America data, to extrapolate that 2.8-billion gallons of gas are lost every year due to under-inflation of tires.

What an inexpensive tire gauge can do for your wallet, the world economy and the environment, Solix EDMS in your data center can do the same. Right Tire pressure or right tiered data in your data center, both yield huge returns. Database Archiving and Application Retirement can decrease the number of servers and spinning disks on the floor, saving valuable space and cutting energy and cooling use, and therefore cost and carbon emissions. And by managing the size of active data it can delay the addition or upgrade of storage servers and disks, saving capital funds, which have become scarce in this economy.

The U.S. Congress is working now on a major clean energy legislation. While the focus of debate and news coverage has been on Clean Energy and creation of jobs. The motivation, of course, is the environment and global warming. Well, if you are looking to do something that benefits yourself, country and the world:

• Buy a tire gauge for your vehicle and use it at the start of every month
• Implement Solix EDMS in your data center

Sai Gundavelli with John Brust of Oracle Corporation discusses on how Solix EDMS is utilizing Oracle 11g to help lower storage costs for its customers while meeting data retention and compliance requirements.

Last month my Alma Mater, the University of Oklahoma (Sooners – National Football Champions for 7 years) invited me to speak to recent graduates. As you might expect, the bulk of the questions were about the economy, market conditions and the job market. That got me thinking about the all to real parallels to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Basically, we are seeing four of the major drivers of the Great Depression repeated in today’s economy:

• Total public and private debt in the United States equaled the US GNPO (for the first time since 1929);
• The stock markets crashed;
• Banks failed;
• Purchasing, both corporate and personal, has dropped precipitously in response, causing the first major deflation across the board since the early 1930s.

Underlying this is a very similar and unstable economic condition. For several years asset value increases have powered U.S, and to an extent world, consumer spending – basically people were living off the increase in asset value of their homes, stocks, and other real and financial properties, which in turn were driven by speculation rather than real increases in value. When those values stopped increasing the speculators bailed, and consumers could no longer afford to keep spending. Thus the underlying problem was that the economy was built on a shaky foundation.

In 1932 President Roosevelt’s answer to this situation was to create a new foundation for the economy based on building a strong infrastructure through the New Deal. This put many unemployed workers back to work, gave destitute families income and home, drove steady GNP growth starting in 1933, and produced the physical infrastructure on which the 50 year economic boom the United States enjoyed in the last half of the 20th Century was based. Today we still drive over roads and bridges built by the WPA in the 1930s.

So, what can we learn from New Deal? Obviously President Obama and his economic advisors are very aware of the importance of rebuilding and improving our infrastructure, and the budget Congress is now debating contains a great deal of money for infrastructure improvement. Today, however, infrastructure means more than roads, bridges, harbors, and airports. It also means strengthening and securing the power grid and the data infrastructure, which is just as important to tomorrow’s economy as paved roads were to the 1930s. And while the President and Congress look to the public parts of that data infrastructure, those of us who work in enterprise IT have a responsibility to strengthen Enterprise infrastructure. And part of that is clearing out the old and obsolescent to make room for the new, more efficient tools of the future, just as the fragile covered bridges of the 1920s needed to be replaced with concrete and steel by the WPA.

Many years back I met Charlie Garry, then an analyst at Meta Group, which later was acquired by Gartner. He presented a very interesting comparison. Imagine the state of your garage when you bought your new home — completely empty. You moved in and started accumulating things – boxes of old toys and clothes, tools, tires. One day the garage is full and you are parking your car in the driveway. You don’t know what you have and can’t find what you need in all the accumulated stuff that once was useful but now is just clutter. This is exactly what happens in many enterprise data centers. While hardware wears out or is replaced by something twice as fast, old software just migrates to the new platform. Like old clothes, obsolescent applications and the business methods the support, including work-arounds created because of their inadequacies, become comfortable to users, who often resist moving to newer replacements because those require changes in habits. The problem is that as long as those old applications are still around, neither the infrastructure nor, even more importantly, the business methods they support, can evolve to meet today’s needs. Today more than ever, businesses and government agencies have to change, often radically, to survive in an economy that is going through a major evolution from its very foundations up.

What data centers today need is application archiving and sunsetting strategies, not just as a one-time cleanup but instituted as part of the IT organization’s normal, ongoing operations. They require an annual review of all applications to determine whether they still meet the needs of the business. This requires support from C-level management (CEO, CFO, COO) and sometimes a degree of ruthlessness, but it will cut costs, and improve productivity and lay the foundation for growth.

Today Budweiser loves to bring out its Clydesdale horse teams and beer wagons designed after those of the 1890s, both in its ads and in person. But when it actually delivers beer, it uses the latest truck technology – diesel today, perhaps hybrid, all electric or hydrogen fuel cell tomorrow. IT needs that mentality – there is no harm in nostalgia, but living in the past is a recipe for disaster.

I am pleased to announce that Solix has signed an OEM agreement with Oracle Financial Services Software, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation, world’s largest enterprise software company. With this -

• Oracle Flexcube customers will be able to buy the Solix EDMS Archiving functionality from Oracle
• By selecting Solix from among the several current competitors, Oracle effectively endorses Solix as a technological leader in its field

This could not come at a better time for Oracle Flexcube customers, given the turmoil in the financial services industry. With budgets slashed and layoffs common, the challenge for their CIOs is to get the best value for the money left in the budget. Their priorites need to be:

• Doing more with less
• Ensuring compliance in the most cost-efficient manner

Solix EDMS helps meet both these goals by automatically managing archiving of data that is no longer in active use but which is required for compliance. This improves Oracle Flexcube performance while decreasing costs by moving older data to inexpensive, inactive media, which decreases storage costs while making the infrastructure more agile. By decreasing the amount of data that needs to be backed up and restored, it also improves DR system performance. It also can accelerate data migration when implementing or upgrading Oracle Flexcube. This is particularly important for multi-national banks that cannot afford long Flexcube down times when upgrading or recovering from an outage.

Solix EDMS can also have a positive impact on Basel II compliance. Published in June 2004, Basel II is intended to create international standards on which banking regulators can base reserve requirements for capital banks to help protect the international financial system from the impacts of the collapse of financial institutions. In practice Basel II imposes rigorous risk and capital management requirements designed to ensure that banks retain appropriate levels of capital reserves, based on the risk level of their lending and investment practices. In general, the greater the risk to the bank, the greater the reserve required to safeguard its solvency and overall economic stability. The final version aims at:

• Ensuring that capital allocation is more risk sensitive
• Separating operational risk from credit risk, and quantifying both
• Attempting to align economic and regulatory capital more closely to reduce the scope for regulatory arbitrage.

Compliance requires that banks upgrade their risk management processes, technology, and corporate guidance. Information Lifecycle management can make a positive impact on achieving those goals while decreasing overall IT capital and operational costs. For instance, Basel II requires that financial institutions apply an EU-formulated Risk Assessment Model at the end of each day of trading to demonstrate the institution’s solvency. If it fails that test, it must inform the authorities immediately and cease trading. By reducing the amount of data involved, Solix EDMS lifecycle management can streamline the analysis process, delivering the results faster at less cost.

Overall, this agreement is a four-way win: A win for Solix, because it is now allied with the world’s largest enterprise software company; a win for Oracle because it can now provide Information lifecycle management to its Flexcube users; a win for Flexcube users because this is the moment where they need this most. And most important, a win for existing Solix customers who now can be assured that Solix EDMS is a very advanced solution and endorsed by Oracle.

As some one said, “A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.” It is funny, yet it is true. According to Ernst & Young and it’s 10 commandments for businesses this year, Enterprises should focus on its cash assets via cost reduction. Manage it well as it is the most precious asset that businesses hold. Ensure that even if your revenues are dropping, you have sufficient cash to meet your obligations. Secondly, pay attention to risk management as unidentified risk can lead to catastrophic results – shown by 2008. Try to ensure that effective risk management is tied directly to business priorities.

Hence the business case for many IT initiatives should essentially focus on cost reduction and risk management. Following are the areas that I believe should be focused upon -

• Secure Your Data: Hard times always generate an increase in security exposures. New Year is a good time to review your security — and remember to include a review of physical security of data and all hardware on which it resides, from servers to laptops to handheld devices. Perhaps the most ignored area by Enterprises is the test data management practices, most security leaks tend to originate from here.
• Rationalize Your Applications: Organizations tend to accumulate obsolete applications. This is an excellent time to conduct a review of all apps in the environment with an eye to consolidating the product portfolio, and establishing and enforcing corporate standards. This can save money on unneeded software licenses, hardware to run that software, and personnel to manage it.
• Manage Your Information Lifecycle: Enterprises should embrace data archiving to move older data to a lower, less-expensive storage tier, along with data purging, thus making production applications leaner and improving overall applications performance.
• Virtualize Your Environment: PC, server, and storage virtualization is growing in use and will be fostered by the tough economy as organizations make the most of the spare capacity they have in-house. Storage technology, server operating systems, and ITOM are among the segments that will benefit from virtualization. You will be better off starting with ILM before virtualizing, as ILM makes the infrastructure lean and makes the Virtualization projects less riskier and easier to implement.
• Institute Green Management Practices: Reducing power and cooling, minimizing printing and paper use, recycling, disposing of old equipment properly, and other Green operations methods can save money and have other business benefits while also decreasing environmental impact. Implementing ILM, Virtualization and Test Data Management can cut the servers & storage, this could be the first step to introducing Green IT to your data center.

Finally, we want to express our sincere appreciation to our customers, partners, and our employees, who have helped us make 2008 a great year, in spite of the tough economy. We wish them and their families the very best for 2009. This will be a happening year for Solix, as our technology rightly fits to the need of the hour for many enterprises.

The latest report by Gartner indicates that ILM market has established credibility and has reached its launch pad and is beginning to take off. We are happy to note that our market share had indeed doubled since the last Gartner report. The growth we are seeing since 2004 when Solix EDMS was initially launched, is quite spectacular. All signs indicate that the market is primed for the hockey stick growth.

• Best estimates are that all ILM vendors together have captured less than 1% of the worldwide market and databases are growing in number and size. The opportunity for all data management vendors, therefore, is huge and growing.
• Software vendors are stopping development of application-specific data management solutions as their customers are rejecting in favor of a strategy of having a single data management tool set that works across all applications, operating systems and databases across the Enterprise.

The economy, however, is having a major effect on this otherwise optimistic situation. While prospects are very interested in the ILM product and in theory have the budget to buy, often they are having problems getting that money released as companies are deferring their spending.

However, the new economy demands new strategies. We have been experimenting on around a new pay-as-you-go, pricing model designed to help prospects get our tools without having to fund the full licensing cost up front. The results are indeed encouraging. The disadvantage of this is that we only realize part of the income from each sale up front, with the rest coming in over the term of the agreement. While this hurts our immediate revenues, this can be very beneficial to prospects who are looking to acquire the solution but unable to because of tight economic conditions.

None of us know how bad the present recession will last. But it is comforting to realize that even in the worst worldwide depression of modern history, the Great Depression of the 1930s, companies that are innovative not only survived but prospered. Solix will now be the first vendor in ILM space to offer subscription based pricing. We can now say to organizations who need Enterprise data management tools but are having problems getting the budget allocated to buy the product outright, “Talk to us. We have the flexible pricing plan to help you.”

I am sure you are thinking, ‘What is this guy talking about? eDiscovery is not milk or fruit…. What is this organic eDiscovery stuff?’

Wherever I go these days, people seem to be talking about eDiscovery. Certainly every email archiving company talks about it. But truly, none of them have a complete solution that can span across all enterprise data — text, images, spreadsheets, documents, audio files, animation, Website and computer programs, across desktops, servers and across network; and I have yet to see a single solution that can handle structured data. Yet this data is very important to enterprise-wide searches; for instance to answer discovery in civil torts. Any eDiscovery solution that cannot examine the data in the organization’s databases leaves you only half-covered, like going to the court without your trousers.

Now you see where I am going with organic eDiscovery. The challenges are daunting. Before you can deploy a search across all enterprise applications, you have to understand all enterprise data. Typically, according to Gartner, Forrester, etc., IT maintains six copies of each production application database to cover testing, training, and development along with, of course, actual production and backup. Obviously search speed can be boosted dramatically by ignoring these copies, particularly since important subsets of the data in most of them should be masked anyhow. So once you understand the duplicate copies, you can optimize the overall search.

Now that we agree that data in enterprise apps need to be searched and that we need to ignore all the duplicate data; the next question is how do you search these very complex databases, with their thousands of tables, multiple versions, patches, and lots of moving parts. First you need to collect each application’s metadata and this requires an enterprise metadata management tool. Most of these solutions, such as Solix Enterprise Data Management Suite(EDMS), include a central repository tool to manage all enterprise metadata and track changes with upgrades and patches. Deploying an enterprise data management solution not only helps in creating a leaner infrastructure, faster applications and in controlling cost of storage, but also becomes the foundation for deploying a true enterprise-wide search/eDiscovery solution.

We just announced our integration with Oracle Universal Online Archive (UOA) to provide document, email, and application data management. This integration lays the foundation to eventually deploy a eDiscovery solution that can span across all enterprise data. With billable rates for junior associates at many law firms now starting above $200 per hour, the cost to review can be enormous. Investing in building the foundation for eDiscovery for review faster and review less prepares the organization for this tight economy.

I hope to see you at our booth, # 2623, Moscone South, at Oracle Open World. Let us explain how Solix EDMS with Oracle UOA can provide the eDiscovery foundation for you.