Customer Panel Highlights: Why Our Customers are so Loyal

Application Retirement, Data Archiving Comments Off on Customer Panel Highlights: Why Our Customers are so Loyal

I always like to talk with pride, why our customers are very loyal to Solix. It’s one thing to talk about our technology and high customer satisfaction, it’s another to hear it directly from customers.

Recently we conducted a group webinar with three of our customers from different industries to discuss best practices for application retirement. The full recording of the hour-long live discussion is available here

The three panel members were:

Mark Parmet, Senior Director, Finance Solutions, Avery Dennison Corp.,
Gary Frederick, Global Vice President of Application Services,
   Stanley Black & Decker, and,
Richard Ilnicki, UK Team Leader, Santander Group.

All three were targeting the same problem, retire legacy applications and reduce costs while meeting the compliance regulations: They needed to retire multiple obsolescent applications and aging hardware, while maintaining access to the data, including reports. Santander had to meet stringent compliance requirements including an absolute guarantee that the data was completely unchanged by the retirement. And it had the largest number of potential retirements because it grows mainly by acquisition. Every independent bank it buys runs on its own infrastructure, which has to be integrated into Santander’s IT environment, which always includes retiring non-standard applications.

All three needed a solution that is independent of applications, operating system, and database platform. They needed a solution that is proven and scalable for all their applications. All three started by researching the field, including talking with Gartner and other industry analysts and looked at several possible solutions including build vs buy. Mr. Ilnicki in particular said his team at Santander looked closely at a large field of vendors, analyzing the costs and other business factors involved in each before arriving at a final list.

Mr. Frederick said that after consulting with several sources his team at Stanley, Black & Decker narrowed the list of candidates to four or five, including Solix. Some offered services only, some provided services and software, but none of the others provided as robust an overall solution as Solix. Mr. Parmet said Solix integrated technology and services, provided the most cost-effective solution. Santander narrowed the choices to Solix and one other vendor and conducted a proof-of-concept with both. “Ultimately Solix provided the best value for the money in functionality and cost.”

One of the largest challenges in any technology change is selling it to the end-users, who generally do not like changes in how they are used to working. Each of the panelists, however reported that the move went very smoothly. Solix sold itself both to the IT staff and to the business users.

Today all three customers have finished their initial retirements, which in two cases involved multiple applications and at Avery Dennison involved the retirement of its financial system. All are continuing to use Solix solution for their ongoing application retirement.

If you are looking for either Data Archiving or an Application retirement solution, to clean aging, seldom-accessed data from operational databases, to improve performance, cut costs, and possibly support a move from spinning disk to flash storage, I urge you to watch the recording of this panel and learn why our customers believe Solix is the best solution.


© Solix Technologies, Inc.
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