With U.S. unemployment at 10%, and another 6% under-employed in part time jobs, plus another 9% who have moved overseas (many back to their home countries), we continue to be in a tough economy. But people and businesses are slowly regaining confidence in the stability of the economy. While there is evidence that IT budgets will increase this year over last, IT needs to be careful about every penny it spends.

One of the biggest drains on IT budgets is the class of obsolescent, duplicate, and unneeded applications that remain running in many data centers. Gartner, for instance, estimates that 10% of applications in un-optimized data centers are eligible for retirement. Retiring these apps can pay tremendous dividends both in savings, by freeing staff for more important assignments, eliminating licensing and maintenance fees, and freeing servers and storage systems either for reassignment or retirement, and by making room for better, more modern replacement.

Typically this has been addressed by SI or ILM vendors who specialize in the vagaries of decommissioning legacy applications and systems. Their value proposition is based on software/services that enable enterprises to continue to have access to historical or decommissioned data without having to incur the expenses of licensing, running and supporting the legacy application or system, including Cloud computing alternatives where appropriate. The data management side of application retirement is a complex issue that can turn a retirement into an expensive consulting project. One problem has been that few comprehensive tool sets have been available until recently, and most of those have been designed to support consultants rather than to automate full retirement processes. Cloud offering, hasn’t yet been a successful delivery model, as many are still hesitant because of the security and privacy concerns.

About a year back, we decided to explore Appliance as a deployment option because of the positive impact it can have on implementation times, costs, return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO). Our goal – Enable Application Retirement with least risk and a rapid return on investment (ROI) and simplify the decision making process for customer. Well, here we are with our product  Solix ExAPPS, Industry’s first Application Retirement Appliance – an integrated set of hardware, storage and software components – Database with Massive Compression capabilities (almost 90% data compression), Application Server and pre-configured Application Retirement engine while providing data access to standard Reporting Tools – all bundled into a single device. 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.

Please check out the following links …

Solix ExAPPS – Press Release
Solix ExAPPS – Data sheet
Solix ExAPPS – White Paper

Finally, let me wish you a belated but heart-felt Happy New Year with the hope that Solix can help you achieve your business goals for the years ahead…

Last week I met Chris Martin and Mick Dawson, who rowed from Japan to North America, setting a new world record, rowing 5,100 miles in 189 days, more than a month than their planned 150 days without giving up. Imagine spending six months rowing, day-in and day-out with only a single companion who is asleep much of the time you are awake — they took turns, one rowing while the other slept – out in the open ocean with no sight of land. This is an epic journey on a par with the greatest adventures of history.

On the way they overcame tremendous challenges – typhoons and tropical storms, and winds and currents that blew them off their planned course and cost them days at sea, thick fog that reduced visibility to a few yards for days. And perhaps the biggest challenge, dodging huge ocean-going freighters and tankers that they encountered in the commercial shipping lane they traveled. Small boats are very difficult to spot from the bridge of a large ship out in the open ocean, and large ships are notoriously difficult to maneuver quickly if the boat is spotted.

While listening to them talk about their experiences, what amazed me was their determination, precise planning, belief in themselves and the tightly knit team effort. It got me thinking how their experience was in some ways similar to Solix journey. I am often asked how tiny Solix can compete and continue to win against industry giants like IBM and HP. Like Martin and Dawson, we are a small boat competing with some of the biggest in the industry, but just like the two yachtsmen, we have key advantages:

• Innovation – Like their shipping lane, our market provides room to maneuver out of the way and keep ahead of the supertankers – in our case through continuous innovation. The rapid data growth being faced by datacenters and the challenges it imposes, gives us a huge opportunity to innovate and develop better answers to customer challenges.
• Passion – Our passion is to delight customers. That is the cornerstone of our foundation.
• Belief – We believe we are the best and we can continue to deliver excellence – the best technology to solve the customer problems and at the least cost.
• Focus – We maintain a tight focus on our market and the needs of our customers. Keeping our eye on our goal is vital to our continued success.
• Determination – We are determined to succeed. We are driven by our passion to meet and exceed customer needs and expectations and offer them advantages the competition cannot, regardless of the amount of effort required.

Martin and Dawson faced an incredible challenge. No one had ever rowed across the North Pacific before; many would say it was foolhardy to try. But they proved it could be done. Like them, Solix is facing the challenge not just of surviving in a challenging market beset with financial storms, but of excelling. And we are meeting that challenge with innovation, passion, belief, focus and determination. Few of our customers we signed recently, have indeed migrated from our competition that alone proves the point.

Happy Holidays !!

It is October, and for Oracle users and industry watchers that means Oracle OpenWorld Conference 2009. In recent years Oracle has become a power in the IT industry with its acquisition spree and most recently Sun Microsystems. One of the major questions on everyone’s mind is what will Larry Ellison announce at the Moscone Center this year.

Every year Oracle OpenWorld is the stage for at least one major Oracle announcement. Three years ago, it was Oracle’s move on Linux support and then the next year, the move on to Virtualization Software. Last year it was the HP/Oracle Appliance offering — a massive parallel processing computer for data warehousing. What will it be this year, could it be any surprise on Java or Salesforce.com (Marc Benioff is doing a keynote at Oracle Open World).

What Oracle really needs is a positive announcement about Oracle Fusion Applications (OFA), its much promised and delayed next generation ERP/CRM system built on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform and delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS), originally announced in 2006 (as “already half finished”) and now promised for 2010.

Oracle’s promise at this initial announcement was to “be the first company on the planet to build a full suite of applications for large and small companies based on standards.” Fusion Apps will combine the best functionality from its ERP/CRM systems (Oracle Applications, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel) built on a new, advanced technology base, with a new user interface, new process model, and new data model. Oracle’s unified application platform going forward, a new generation of service-oriented, Web 2.0-based applications is to have business intelligence integrated as a pervasive element and be designed to integrate easily into SOA architectures. It will make a clear shift from application silos to supporting end-to-end business processes.

Oracle critics have raised questions about when exactly Oracle will introduce Fusion Apps., and whether the new platform will be enough when it does arrive. The strongest reply to these questions would be the announcement of a market launch date or at least a positive progress report.

However, even when OFA does arrive, it will present serious challenges for users. One of the largest of these will be data migration from present generation applications to a new and as yet not publicly defined database structure. Data migrations are fraught with issues, often exceed timelines and budgets, and can create challenges to application migration acceptance. Understanding exactly what needs to be migrated and determining the rules for mapping to the target environment will require significant time and effort. Best practice is to ensure that the scope of the initiative is limited to data sources that will be required or that add value to the target application or data structures. Just because data sources related to the target are available does not mean there is business value in migrating them. Often, not all historical data needs to be migrated to the target. By archiving or disposing of older, non-value-added data, the level of effort and timeframes can be minimized.

For most organizations, the lack of concern about, and clear understanding of, the magnitude of data quality issues will create problems. In many cases, substantial amounts of rework will be required to address data quality issues encountered during the development of the migration processes. Again, the more data involved in the migration, the more likely, more numerous, and more severe these problems will be.

ILM software such as Solix EDMS can play a vital role in preparing for the massive data migration that moving to Fusion Apps will require, and the time to think about that is now, before the migration begins. The purpose of ILM software is to identify data no longer in active use and archive it out of the production database automatically, in an organized manner that preserves access to that data when it is needed. The obverse of that coin is that it also identifies the subset of data that is active and that therefore needs to be migrated. By reducing the size of the production databases that will be migrated, it can reduce the time, effort, and number of data quality issues that will be involved, while preserving access to the archived data through its own or other industry-standard data viewers.

As with everything involving very large business databases containing vital business information, however, ILM cannot be installed, implemented and run in a day. As the deadline approaches for the introduction of Fusion Apps, this means that Oracle’s several hundred thousand enterprise customers should seriously consider ILM now. This will give them time to select a product, install and test it, and then start a gradual archiving process for their major databases that will leave only the active data in the production database when the time comes to migrate to Fusion Apps. That will give them a major head start on migration, and the good news is that in the meantime archiving with a strong ILM tool such as Solix EDMS will improve the performance of their present architecture while delaying and decreasing Capex expenditures on expensive Tier 0 and Tier 1 storage systems.

Cloud computing is widely seen as the new wave, the next big thing, and the realization of a vision of computing as a utility like electricity, delivered out of a plug in the wall and billed based on how much you use. From inside the industry it can be either a promise or a threat. Like it or not, however, it will be a reality.

What is Cloud Computing?

Gartner defines cloud computing as “a style of computing in which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ using Internet technologies to multiple external customers.”

In general, everything in computing seems to be getting the as-a-service tail.

Why Cloud

Cloud computing offers several major advantages to users,

• First, it avoids capital expenditure (CapEx) on IT.
• Second, consumption is usually billed on a utility (e.g. resources consumed, like electricity) or subscription (e.g. time based, like a newspaper) basis with little or no upfront cost, eliminating all the complexity of trying to predict what the organization will need three years hence.
• Third, the organization does not need to recruit, pay, and retain people with sometimes rare skills that have nothing to do with the core business.
• Fourth, it gives the business huge flexibility to respond very quickly to business changes compared to the months that it takes to purchase and install a new server and sometimes years to implement an ERP system.
• Fifth, cloud service vendors also can provide a level of disaster recovery capability that many businesses simply cannot afford to build into their internal systems, simply by the nature of the Cloud.

Other benefits of this time sharing style approach are low barriers to entry, shared infrastructure and costs, low management overhead, and immediate access to a broad range of applications. Users can generally terminate the contract at any time (thereby avoiding return on investment risk and uncertainty) and the services are often covered by service level agreements (SLAs) with financial penalties

The Buzz

Forrester Research advises CFOs to take a close look at cloud computing for messaging and collaboration and enterprise applications. Gartner Says Cloud Computing Will Be As Influential As E-business. Gartner also says that cloud computing is very much an evolving concept that will take many years to fully mature.

Issues with Cloud

The first of these to surface in most conversations is data security and loss of control over data. The second is quality-of-service (QoS), including network latency issues. Hence while the buzz is there, Enterprises are slow in embracing the Cloud initiative.

How Solix EDMS helps Enterprises launch into Cloud

Solix offers several products that have direct application to Cloud Computing:

• Solix EDMS Data Masking can provide much greater security by masking the sensitive data as it leaves the organization to go to the Cloud and then unmasking that data as it is retrieved. This ensures that data can only be read by authorized individuals and not by hackers on the Web or dishonest employees of the Cloud service provider.
• Solix EDMS Data Archiving can improve network latency by archiving off the least active data and improving the application performance, potentially that can offset the network latency time lag.
• Solix EDMS Application Retirement can be the first Enterprises should target by relocating least business active data to the cloud. With this, they can start evaluating the cloud offering and analyze the benefits of cloud with least business risk. Reviewing application portfolio can help Enterprises identify underperforming or redundant systems where maintenance outweighs business value. By retiring these applications, companies can optimize their portfolio, reducing cost and risk. Application Retirement is removing a system, application, database or platform from service, while retaining access to the business-critical data. Solix EDMS Application Retirement provides this vital data management functionality of relocating and making the business-critical data available via Cloud offering.

Overall, Enterprise Data Management is an important part of the planning in any move from the data center to the Cloud. If issues related to Cloud are not tackled before the cut-over to new Cloud services, that can undermine the advantages of the Cloud and in extreme cases, force the organization to return to its older, more expensive internal environment. Well, we have lot to do, exciting times ahead…