The world is becoming data driven. The other day I read about a first class passenger on a major airline tweeting about bad food he’d been served. This person was an important customer – a frequent flier with a large Twitter following. So this was exactly the kind of publicity that a company does not want. Fortunately the airline monitored tweets in real time, and the team immediately alerted the cabin crew on the airplane, who spent the flight pampering this passenger. By the time he landed he was so pleased that he tweeted that it was the best flight he’d ever taken. Not only had the airline kept the customer, it had turned around a publicity problem that threatened to hurt its reputation.

I was talking recently to the CIO of a large retail home improvement services company with 8,000 field service agents. The company tracks the routing of its delivery trucks for route optimization, they now want capture data from mobile phone to analyze how long each service person spends with each customer. They want to correlate the same with customer feedback and see how customer retention is being impacted.

One of the largest security issues of any company is internal espionage by employees. One of our customer, semiconductor company that monitors when employees go in and out of the office, what they print on company printers, and what data and applications they access. It analyzes this combined data to identify suspicious activity.

The point is, Enterprise data foot print is expanding, it is no longer ERP, CRM, Supply Chain and other traditional systems of record. It is streaming past on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms and generated by devices ranging from Fitbits, smartphones to sensors. There are new kinds of data from new sources and need for real time analysis to discover both potential problems and opportunities. Capturing and analyzing all this data to extract knowledge requires a scalable platform that supports all three “V”s – volume, velocity and variety of data types, at the lowest cost.

The answer to this is the Solix Big Data Suite. This includes Solix Enterprise Archive and Solix Enterprise Data Lake on top of Hadoop. If you want to discuss how your company can leverage Big Data for business advantage – Optimized infrastructure, Data Security and Advanced Analytics platform, call us.

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.

The tremendous growth in volumes of data – both traditional structured data and new data types such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) – and the advent of in-memory database technologies like SAP’s HANA and NAND flash storage that are faster but more expensive – has made data archiving mandatory. Companies simply cannot afford to operate as they once did, allowing years of data, much of it seldom used, to accumulate in single-tier databases. The old data clogs systems, hurting performance, and, when that database is running on flash or in-memory, it also becomes prohibitively expensive.

For too long, organizations have debated the best way to deal with the lifecycle of application data. Organizations want to engage in true Information Lifecycle Management while ensuring governance, data security, and operational efficiency. While unstructured data archiving is relatively simple as mostly it is based on date stamp, structured data archiving is complex and multiple methods have been used. Here is what we recommend to our customers:

0-3 years of Application Data – Inline – ILM Partitioning

A great deal of research shows that data that is more than about one year old is essentially inactive, accessed only occasionally for business analysis and compliance audits. Some data, such as telephone call records in telecom industry, becomes inactive even sooner. This data needs to be moved off the tier 0 in-memory or tier 1 NAND flash storage to a lower, less expensive SATA disk tier. The original application, however, still needs access for business analysis, tax reporting, and compliance auditing. The answer is to partition the database, basically creating a separate instance of the data on lower tier media that looks to the application like part of the core database. This trick can improve performance of transactional systems tremendously, allow the business to use its high-cost, solid-state storage for only the most valuable data, and simultaneously support business analysis and auditing of all the data in the original application.

Solix can assist an organization’s IT department with creating partitions that not only can improve application performance and save backup and recovery time but make sense in the larger lifecycle of organizational data. However, this partitioned data continues to reside in the database and does not reduce the load on costly, Tier 1 servers and the infrastructure and utilities needed for them. Partitioning alone is not Information Lifetime Management (ILM). When utilized in the context of business rules created by the organization, it becomes an essential part of the ILM framework. Also, applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, does not support this method on application modules that are already partitioned by the application.

3-7 years of Application Data – Near line – Database Archiving

For data that is older, three to seven years, Solix Database archiving offers the next step in the ILM framework. Archiving can remove massive amounts of data from the servers, yet the data remains accessible to the business user from the native application. This is done while ensuring data integrity and information governance of the data. Database Archiving helps in improving application performance by reducing the amount of production data that applications must process. This also means faster backups, upgrades, and disaster recovery and reduced cloning time. For many organizations, operational costs, including utilities and the ability to reallocate staff time to more mission-critical operations, will also benefit. The challenge for this method is application upgrades as archive data also needs to be upgraded and kept in sync with the native application.

7+ years of Application Data – Offline – Big Data Archiving

For data older than seven years, Solix Enterprise Archiving allows data to detach from the original application. Built on Apache Hadoop, Solix Enterprise Archiving is highly scalable and utilizes commodity hardware, reducing the need for Tier 1 storage. It is an inexpensive, scale-out storage option for old data that can save on licensing fees and other expenses. This data is still searchable and query-able with user-friendly dashboards, ensuring governance, security, and business needs are met at the highest levels. The main advantage, this creates an Enterprise archive platform and with Enterprise Data Lake, lays the foundation for Next generation enhanced analytics.

Each of the above methods, has implications on:

• Application Upgrade,
• Application Performance,
• De-Archive,
• Cost,
• Reports Search,
• Backup & DR,
• Operational Efficiency,
• Application Testing, and,
• Meeting Regulatory Compliance Requirements.

Solix is the only vendor today providing support for all the above three methods with our Solix EDMS product. We believe Enterprises should embrace this three tier method for all their application for optimized performance, lower costs and enhanced analytics.

With the New Year, I want to wish everyone and especially our friends, customers, partners, and staff, a happy and bountiful 2015. For Solix Technologies 2014 was an incredible growth year with the launch of the Kronos/ADP OEM, being named one of the leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant – Structured Data Archiving and Application Retirement, and finally the launch of the Solix Big Data Suite.

This promises to be an even more exciting year for many of us involved in Big Data, as many companies that have been doing proof-of-concept and developing basic skills with Hadoop and other new data tools move to full-scale production Big Data implementations. This, however, is not without its challenges, and many CIOs start the year caught in the middle between demands for greater operational efficiencies and cost control and the push to implement these new Big Data technologies, many of them not completely mature, in a production environment. Hadoop makes it easy and inexpensive to capture very large amounts of data of virtually any type. To get value from the data, companies need to organize and analyze it to answer the questions that can guide the business.

Solix Technologies has the answers to the problems of deriving value from large volumes of data, whether that is traditional structured, unstructured, semi-structured data types. Running on top of Apache Hadoop and taking full advantage of Hadoop’s capabilities, the Solix Big Data Suite empowers enhanced business intelligence (BI) while providing operational efficiency, including ETL and ELT processes and selective archiving of data to meet compliance and internal needs. Our value proposition can simplify infrastructure and reduce infrastructure costs, support enterprise analytics that go beyond traditional BI.

The Solix Big Data Suite delivers a new enterprise blueprint to help CIOs control infrastructure costs while providing next-generation BI tools that give business users direct access to interactive data analysis. This allows business users to pursue lines of inquiry wherever they may lead to discover insights and opportunities that can drive business growth. The Suite brings the first true information lifecycle management (ILM) environment to Big Data in Apache Hadoop. Gartner has rated Solix Technologies among the leaders in its Structured Data Archiving and Application Retirement Magic Quadrant. To learn more, download this Gartner Newsletter – “The New Enterprise Blueprint” which includes the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and contact us for a discussion on how Solix can help Capture, Organize and Analyze all Enterprise Data.

We have an exciting journey ahead of us, potential to help Enterprises adopt Apache Hadoop and reinvent themselves. We wish our customers and partners the very best for 2015.