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.

After my last blog (CIO To Do List – The Challenge of Protecting Sensitive Data), we surveyed several CIOs on their management of test data. What we found is that many of those we talked do not seem to appreciate the immense risk that test data taken from live databases could fall into the wrong hands and reveal competitive secrets to competitors and others, severely damaging their organization’s position in the marketplace.

The initial response of most CIOs we contacted is that they are aware of the danger of test data exposing sensitive information, and their staff is doing an adequate job of protecting that data. However, when asked what data they consider sensitive, few mention competitive information. And none of them were able to explain how their staff monitor test processes to ensure security and privacy of sensitive data. And they had no answer to the question of how they ensure their IT staff doesn’t misuse their data access privileges.

The focus of almost everyone contacted is on the legal implications of losing Social Security or credit card numbers and similar personal identity information of their customers. Of course these issues have been almost constantly in the news for several years, and companies and government agencies have gotten black eyes when someone gets careless with a laptop holding parts of their customer database. As a result, most CIOs seem to think that all they have to do is mask a few key fields in their test databases and end up masking few sensitive fields. This might meet specific legal requirements, but it does nothing to protect vital competitive secrets.

However, when asked about competitive information such as bill of materials, price lists, or discounts, almost all agreed that they were not doing enough to address the security of this data. What bothers me most is that most of those we talked don’t seem to realize that the loss of this information can damage their businesses at least as much as the loss of a customer database. And this information is commonly included in test databases. Imagine your company going into a competitive bid against a competitor who knows exactly how much of a discount you will offer the customer. And that is just one scenario. A leak of employee information could let a competitor raid your company for its top producers; manufacturing methodologies could be very valuable to a foreign competitor who wants to raid your markets; drug discovery information can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The list goes on. You could be losing vital information, putting company at a serious disadvantage in the marketplace, and have no way to figure out what was lost, what its business value is, or where the leak is. In fact, few companies even have systems in place to monitor how test data is used, who handles it, and whether and under what conditions it is shared with vendors and outside contractors.

And in some cases the exposure may reach far beyond the test data itself, into the heart of the company. If the test data comes from a system that is integrated with the corporate ERP, CRM, or financial solution, it could conceivably contain the security keys supporting that connection. If so, it could become an open door into those systems that any competent competitor could use either to extract copies of production data or, worse, to introduce false data.

And the risk is not just that outsiders such as vendors may get this data. Who watches the internal IT people who have access to this data? For instance, test data extracted from corporate HR could easily give IT employees – and employees of contractors who often also have unrestricted access to test databases – accesses to information that should not be allowed out of HR. Yes the names are redacted, but that doesn’t even begin to answer the security issues involved. Just the rumors that could start – that have started from this one scenario – are the stuff of nightmares.

The bottom line: The data security problem involved with test data is immense; few organizations appreciate the magnitude of the problem; and masking a few fields in production data does not even begin to address the problem. This is a comprehensive data security issue.

As a result, we are announcing a Data Privacy pack for Oracle applications starting at $25K. This provides a comprehensive solution that can extend to multiple environments at a starting price point. We firmly believe that CIOs need to address the test data security issue immediately and that this product will put them far ahead at a low cost in both money and time.

One day, God appeared before a CIO and said, “Dear CIO, you have been a wonderful person. I am pleased with you, and I would like to grant you three wishes.”

Naturally, the CIO was very pleased. After some thought, and being a modest person at heart, he said, “Lord, my aspirations are not huge. I would be very happy and bless Your name forever if You could fill these three wishes:

1. I want a bigger home.
2. I am planning a family vacation and need vacation money. And,
3. I want my family to be happy.”

“These are very reasonable wishes,” God said. “I will be happy to grant them.”

God then magically created red and green garbage bags and handed them to the CIO, saying:

“Go forth and examine each of your household items. Put everything that you have not used for the last three years and don’t need in the Red Garbage Bag, and put everything that you have not used for the last three years but might need again in the Green Garbage Bag.”

And the CIO went forth and did as God commanded. He examined each and every item in his house and collected all those items his family had not used in three years into the Red and Green Garbage Bags. Once that was done, God appeared again and said, “Take the items in the Green Garbage Bag and place them in the garage for inexpensive storage. But the items in the Red Garbage Bag, sell them on eBay.”

And the CIO went forth and did as God commanded. Then God said, “Look ye at thy house.” And the CIO looked and found that his house seemed larger and cleaner with less number of things in his house.

And God said, “Take the money from the items sold and use that for your vacation.” And the CIO was happy.

Then God said, “And to fulfill your third wish, go and show your wife and your children what has been wrought.” And the CIO went to his wife and children and said, “Behold, for the Lord has worked a miracle. Our house has more room, and we have money for our vacation.” And his wife and children rejoiced. And the CIO praised God for granting his wishes. And it was the seventh day, and the CIO rested from his labors.

And on Monday the CIO returned to his data center and looked around. And behold, he realized that he wanted a larger data center, and he wanted money to give a bonus to his employees, and he wanted his employees to be happy. And he realized that as he had done at home, so should he do at work. So he called together his executive team and said unto them, “Go through our data center and our IT environment and identify every item we have not used in the last three years, both physical and logical items. And tag those items that we might need again with a green tag and those items we will not need with a red tag.”

And the executive team went forth, but they found that the data center had so many applications that no one knew what many of them were doing or which might be needed and which might not. And so they came back to him and said, “Verily we have struggled mightily with this task, but we are not able to complete it, for we cannot be sure which applications we need and which applications we do not.”

So the CIO retired into his sanctum and prayed to God, saying, “Lord, as at home, so at work; I wish to apply Thy Divine Wisdom to make my data center larger, raise money for things we need, and boost morale. But we cannot tell the sheep from the goats, the applications we need from the applications we do not. We need help!”

And the Lord harkened to the plea of His servant and said, “Check ye with www.solix.com and ask them for their help, for behold, Solix EDMS can help thee understand enterprise applications, and sunset older applications and systems while retaining the data through the miracle of XML data archiving.”

And the CIO called his team together and told them what God had said. And the team rejoiced and used Solix EDMS to:

• Reduce infrastructure, making space for new systems without additional space, power or cooling requirements;
• Save bottom line expenses, which provided money for a bonus for the entire team;
• Increase team morale by eliminating aging, increasingly problematic systems and streamlining work routines throughout the organization.

The moral of the story: We are often so forward-looking in IT that we seldom look back at what we have accumulated over the years. When we do, we are surprised at what we find in our data centers that is taking up valuable space, power, cooling, and staff attention. This often includes collections of old applications that have been superseded by newer solutions but never shut down or that have lost their purpose to changing business needs. Sunsetting older applications and systems is a well recognized good practice that is too seldom followed, in part because manually analyzing all those applications to find the candidates for sunsetting and then manually archiving the data just in case it is needed again is labor intensive and expensive. However, Solix EDMS can automate the process by running data analytics across all enterprise applications and databases to discover those that are not being accessed or updated. Once you understand all your data, you can identify candidates for application sunsetting and data archiving, creating the basis for a more agile infrastructure and for scaling the platform to support e-discovery, data quality improvement and business intelligence.

Earlier this month an anonymous hacker posted files containing personal data on 6 million residents of Chile on Fayerwayer.com, a popular Chilean technology blog. The three compressed files posted by the hacker, who calls himself “Anonymous Coward,” were apparently stolen from a Chilean government agency and included names, addresses, telephone numbers and taxpayer identification numbers, everything a cybercriminal needs to steal their identities.

At the same time, the Hannaford Bros. supermarket chain, located in the Northeast United States, announced that a data breach may have revealed 4 million customer credit and debit card numbers to criminals.

These are just the latest in a long list of data breaches that have exposed customers and taxpayers to identity theft . While businesses would rather keep such incidents private, in the United States and many other nations they are required to publicly disclose data security breaches.

These breaches are much more than an embarrassment. Last October the Ponemon Institute in Tucson, Ariz., found that data theft cost companies $5 million to $50 million per breach. The average total recovery costs were $140 per lost customer record. And this does not include possible lost business due to the damage to the organization’s reputation, which are very hard to quantify. Nor does it include the impact on stock performance. Researchers at Emory University’s Zymand School of Brand Science found that the average stock value fell 0.63% to 2.1% when a company announced a breach.

Addressing the issue
Despite these high costs, many organizations are not taking adequate precautions to address this issue. A survey conducted by Forrester Consulting for the RSA entitled “The State of Data Security in North America” reveals that many businesses are still in a ‘reactive mode’ when deploying data security measures and often struggle with the challenge of creating and implementing planned strategies for data loss prevention. Many businesses still fail to understand the extent, possible impact, and danger of this mammoth problem. IT organizations focused on “putting out fires” and on other threats are not allocating budgets to solve it. For instance, according to blogger-in-chief John Soat, it is still not in the CIO – Top Ten list to do. And often the attitude is that data security is strong in the organization, so it can’t happen here. What they miss is that the organizations that are reporting data theft also had strong firewalls, modern encryption, and updated digital intrusion detection.

So if those organizations had strong security, where is the breach happening? First, the bulk of the confidential information stolen — customer data, employee data, financial information, intellectual property or competitive information – is stored in ERP applications (e.g., Oracle, SAP, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards). These production applications have very strong built-in security, and they are seldom the source of the problem. Too often the problem lies in lax test data management processes that support application development, QA, and test. Test Data Management copies typically are full copies of a production database with no masking of sensitive personal data. They are accessed legitimately by internal developers, consultants, and outsourced developers. All the hacker has to do is get a job in development, carry a key chain USB memory device to work, and walk out the door with a copy of the development database. He doesn’t care if the database is the latest version, even if some data has changed, there is often enough good information to make him rich. And because he has legitimate access, the company may not even know that a breach has taken place until customers start seeing their bank and credit card accounts being drained.

So what can companies do to protect themselves from this major open door in their organizations? Fortunately, Secure Test and Development allow masks sensitive customer data in development databases without destroying their usefulness. Further controls can be realized by monitoring the cloning log via active data auditing, with real-time alerts being sent when suspicious activity is detected.

Securing test and development copies is a vital first step in building data security for the enterprise. Installing a Secure Cloning solution, along with strong personnel policies, can greatly decrease the organization’s exposure and, if a data breach does occur, can demonstrate that the company did make good faith best efforts to secure the data of its customers should it end up in a lawsuit like TJX.

Last week, I flew from New York to North Carolina on Jetblue. My seat mate was a financial analyst who makes this trip weekly and was focused on his seat TV. He was curiously watching a television show on CNBC and something about South Africa. During a break he said he was a South African and was watching an interview about electricity rationing there, which started a discussion of conservation and economics.

Electricity rationing is becoming a trend worldwide. Brazil and Cuba now ration electricity, and New York and New Jersey are threatening to restrict power allotments for data centers. Anybody who does not think this is a world crisis should look back to 1973 and 1979, when the phrase “energy crisis” entered the English language. The parallels to today are striking: Oil prices are soaring, touching $118 a barrel recently. The dollar is weak; the political situation in Venezuela, a major oil supplier to the United States, is destabilizing; the United States is entangled in a seemingly endless war in the Middle East, the stock market is fading, and inflation is high (the price of food has doubled in the last year). But unlike the 1970s, when the economy was robust, today economic growth is slowing and the economy is threatened by the sub prime and credit card debt crises. The United States, with 5% of the world’s population, consumes 23% of the total energy produced in the world, far more per capita than any other country. That 5% of the world’s population has as much environmental impact than the 51% that live in the other five largest countries. And the cost of that energy, whether it is gasoline at the pump or electricity at the meter, is going up rapidly.

All of that suggests that enterprises need to focus on energy management both to find major savings in their operational budgets and to cut their carbon footprints, and that we are on the verge of seeing the appearance of Corporate Energy Officers in businesses. Organizations need to know their energy use, its cost over time, and how that energy is used and what it produces for the enterprise. And it needs to manage those costs and conserve energy wherever they can. IT can make a major contribution to this by embracing virtualization, ILM based tiered storage, Data Subsetting for Test/Dev instances, which reduces storage, consolidates the server population, cuts both power and cooling needs in the data center, and adds up to a significant drop on energy use. How significant? BT has cut 3,100 physical Wintel servers to 134 and eight data centers to three across the United Kingdom. This had a significant positive impact on the corporation’s bottom line and its carbon footprint, and improved its service to users, all while BT itself continued steady strong growth. It is time that we stop thinking of conservation as tree huggers versus business. The fact is that energy and carbon reduction are good business, and those who realize it now can position themselves to be the leaders in the next financial era.

Database archiving on a tiered storage architecture is moving onto center stage in this era of global warming, accelerating data storage demand, increasing energy costs, overcrowded physical data centers. From the archiving point-of-view, business data comes in three forms: structured data from formal databases, unstructured data from informal sources, and semi-structured (email) that contains unstructured content in a structured metadata wrapper. While this semi-structured data is claiming the greatest attention at present, structured data growth is accelerating as well, and from a data archiving standpoint it has its own important and often neglected issues.

Gartner estimates that 80% of the structured data in most enterprise data centers is inactive. Gartner also estimates that a staggering 50% of enterprise data centers worldwide will run out of power and cooling capacity this year (2008) due in part to the out-of-control growth of storage systems and subsystems. And experts estimate that growing energy costs will emerge as the second largest line item on 70% of enterprise IT operating budgets worldwide by next year (2009). Given that many IT organizations are entering their 2009 budget process now, and that pressures to “do more with less” are only increasing, data archiving is no longer an “ideal” or “visionary statement.” It is an immediate issue that must be addressed this year – in many cases immediately. And in the greater picture, scientists are issuing shrill warnings that if we do not cut our carbon load drastically; global warming will rise to disaster levels.

Inactive data occupies valuable Tier 1 and 2 disk spaces, an effect that is greatly multiplied by the database copies that proliferate in a large IT environment. It adds extra compute loads, decreasing performance, increases power use and heat loads, decreases the lifespan of primary processing systems, and forces premature migration to expensive, larger disk storage systems. It can have a marked effect on the lifespan of the physical data center, since most data centers are replaced or rebuilt because they have run out of space or power and cooling long before they are physically obsolete.

Conversely, archiving, which means moving the data to a lower tier in a multi-tier system (for instance to inexpensive SATA disks), and possibly to a secondary site accessed through the network, can decrease pressure on the data center dramatically, increase the life of primary processors and delay purchase of new high-performance storage. A comprehensive purging of the inactive data from all the secondary copies can have a dramatic positive effect on the data center and decrease litigation risk by removing information that might be used against the organization in court. Data that is completely inactive but needed for compliance can be removed to tape or un-powered disks kept off site.

This can delay or in some cases negate the need for major server and storage system upgrades, saving not only the hardware purchase price but also networking, power and cooling, server provisioning and administration, and disposal of old systems. It also has a dual positive impact on the environment by cutting both demand for energy that often is generated by burning coal, natural gas or petroleum, and delaying disposal of older systems, which often end up leaking various pollutants into ground water.

Most IT departments have no idea of the energy requirements of the various boxes in their data centers. This indicates that they have a major opportunity to reduce their energy use, and save on their operating budgets, by optimizing that energy use. The first step is to analyze and optimize the energy demands of each system. In many cases, data archiving will play a major role in such efforts. Thus, identifying archiving the huge volumes of inactive data in most environments is a green strategy in both senses of that word and can have a major positive impact on both the IT budget and the data center’s carbon footprint, a clear win for all concerned.