Here’s a tale of two Application Retirements

The first was a pharmaceutical company that was recently acquired by a global major and had to retire its ERP and move over some of the more current data to the acquirer’s corporate ERP, some to the corporate Datawarehouse, and rest – the most historical and scarcely accessed data – archived to a secure repository for meeting long term statutory compliance or be accessed for audits or e-Discovery purpose.

The second was another global major that had lots (over a few hundred) departmental applications running in its different Divisions and subsidiaries around the world. A couple of years back it standardized on SAP. To reduce IT infrastructure costs it decided to decommission old hardware and all its legacy applications. The challenge was to maintain application context to all this data coming from many different applications running on mainframes, proprietary platforms and even Unix-based systems.

These are two ends of the spectrum on Application Retirement. While the basic problem is the same – preserving application context to the legacy data and making it available for reporting/query purposes long after the hardware and the application has been removed from the premises – there’s a clear difference between the two. The first is a RDBMS-based fairly modern ISV developed ERP running on a distributed system. The second is more complex – with many (and multiple) non-relational bespoke and packaged systems running on multiple proprietary systems and mainframes. However, the approach till today had been the same for both – one of throwing a lot of consulting effort even if an archiving solution tailored for application retirement was being used.

At Solix, we wondered if we could take a different approach and make the Application Retirement process for the first category simpler, make it faster and make it cheaper. We took the analogy of municipality planning. Modernizing the existing downtown in Sunnyvale, California that has lots of small houses and a few large bungalows but has no high rises must necessarily be different if one has to do the same in a city like Chicago.

Birth of an Appliance

Given our goals of (1) Making it Simpler, (2) Making it Faster, (3) Getting a Quicker ROI, and (4) Reducing the Total Cost of Ownership, we looked at different options. The challenge was to automate the entire process once the candidate(s) for application retirement had been identified: from data classification, data migration, building application context, data de-duplication & compression to enabling querying and reporting. It was a business problem that our Engineering had to solve. That’s the hallmark of Innovation in today’s world. We are proud to announce Industry’s First Application Retirement Appliance.

Solix ExAPPS: Industry’s First Application Retirement Appliance

Solix ExAPPS provides a complete hardware and software combination for Application Retirement and data preservation plug-and-play solution. 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. This is how it stacks up:

All that a customer has to do is point Solix ExAPPS at the first candidate for application retirement using a Web browser. After that Solix ExAPPS will migrate all the application data including transactional business objects and reports, add application context to the legacy data, provide de-duplication, compression, and store in an immutable form in Solix ExAPPS. Once that is done, business users or IT can query and report on the legacy data using standard reporting tools that are used in enterprises. To meet compliance requirements, Solix ExAPPS would make the legacy data immutable to guarantee that the data cannot be modified. This process would then be repeated for the next application candidate. You can do this for packaged or custom applications running on any RDBMS on Windows, Linux or Unix system. It cannot get simpler than that.