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.

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.

I am proud to announce that Solix Technologies is a leader in Gartner’s latest ‘Magic Quadrant for Structured Data Archiving and Application Retirement’. This is particularly significant because Solix is the only specialized vendor among the leaders. The other three – IBM, Informatica and Hewlett-Packard – are huge, diversified companies with much greater resources, while almost all the other vendors are shown as niche players.

So why Solix is in this coveted league, here are the top ten reasons as I see it –

1. Team – Our biggest asset is our team. Many team members have been with Solix since the founding of the company. This team can walk on water, can run 100k race and can also move mountains. They are incredible and that is our key strength. When prospects ask why they should choose Solix, we always talk about our team.
2. Technology – We have a strong technology architecture based on a single code base developed in-house. Solix did not build its technology through acquisition and assembly of unrelated pieces of code. As a result our code is clean and scalable, and our engineers understand it intimately since they wrote every line.
3. Pricing – We offer multiple and very flexible pricing models including on-demand, subscription, perpetual and managed services. Customers can choose the plan that best matches their needs.
4. Product Direction – We have a strong product direction going forward. What we have accomplished so far is only a foundation for what we intend to do in the future. As our customers move into the era of Big Data, we intend to help them manage that data and, more importantly, extract value from it with sophisticated analysis and visualization tools.
5. Size Matters – We are small, nimble, and customer-driven. We are very responsive to the needs of every customer, and those needs define our development path going forward.
6. Happy Customers – This is the reason, why we have been able to maintain our independence while our competitors have sold themselves to major vendors. We never forget that, and we always strive to keep our customers happy.
7. Partner Friendly – We have worldwide presence today through our partner ecosystem, so no matter where you are you can get local support from a Solix partner.
8. Credibility – We have the credentials and certifications to demonstrate our expertise. We have been selected for an OEM relationship by ASG, Kronos and Oracle Corp, which shows the confidence these market leaders have on our technology.
9. Customer Advisory Board – We have a strong customer advisory board covering multiple vertical industries. The board provides a formal channel for customers to determine the direction of product development and the company.
10. Happy People – We are a happy people, excited about the journey and the potential impact we can make to Enterprises in the coming decade.

A company like Solix cannot bluff its way into the Gartner Leaders Quadrant, particularly given that our competition includes IBM and HP – Fortune 15 companies. Being rated in that league is an achievement for our entire team that we intend to build on. So stay tuned, because things are going to get exciting.