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:

• 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?
• 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.
• 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.

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.