For years, packaged solutions for Database Archiving seemed like a beautiful foster child that had to be adopted only after a home grown baby was attempted, perhaps conceived but finally failed.

With nearly 1000 customers around the world using packaged Database Archiving solutions, there’s now the industry accepted threshold of customer proof points. The good thing is that most customers have reported significant ROI from their archiving software to the analyst firms who have conducted customer surveys in this area. A most recent study has also shown Solix doubling market share in the last two years*.

Solix customers for Database Archiving range from Asia, Europe and North America in diverse verticals like Discrete Manufacturing, Telecom, Logistics, Federal and CPG running packaged ERPs/CRMs like Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, Siebel, BaaN and custom applications on Oracle and other Databases. All of them reported a high ROI.

While we have had market validation – from both customers and analysts – our challenge is to provide even a higher ROI than what our competitors offer, and that’s where innovation comes in.

Our most recent innovation was what Sai referred in his last blog: our integration with Oracle Universal Online Archive. With this integration customers will get unmatched higher security, retention management, storage management, Records Management, and auditing to the archived data. The Compliance Officer can have a good night’s sleep, confident that archived data cannot be modified. This is what only Solix offers among Database Archiving vendors. And we are confident, that customers will now see exponentially higher ROI as they adopt this integrated offering.

* This compares market shares as stated in Gartner’s September 2006 Report versus their October 2008 Report.

There’s an apocryphal story I heard about a CIO who asked his DBA to surreptitiously archive one month’s data from his ERP each week, starting with the oldest data stretching back five years. The DBA archived to the point where the oldest historical data was being accessed by any functional user. As expected, the DBA archived three years’ data and the functional users never noticed. The question then is why did he have to move the data in a covert manner?

Business owners – the true owners of the data – are usually the most reluctant when they hear the word “archive”. They think data will be moved offline and access will be lost – never mind the fact that they rarely, if ever, access it at all! Perhaps the solitary word “archive” is a misnomer. Some prefix it and call it “active archiving” – meaning the data would still remain active – while others refer to it as “near-line archiving” – where data would be moved to near-line storage and still be accessed online. And there are some who avoid the word “archive” altogether and call it “data relocation”.

Whatever one may call it – once archived, moved or relocated – business users – and not just CIOs and DBAs – see immediate benefits in terms of application performance improvements. One such customer, a BaaN user on Informix Database, ran into serious issues whenever the application hit the table limit size. The system would be down for several days seriously impacting manufacturing schedules. With Solix EDMS, which supports BaaN Archiving, the customer now moves closed historical data to a separate database, resulting in:

• Improved application performance and stability – which in turn, helped to maintain their manufacturing schedules
• Reduced future hardware costs through space reclamation after DB size reduction
• Reduced downtime associated with frequent database maintenance
• Reduced backup and restore downtime.

A non-believer may say a swallow does not make a summer. Customers like Forbes Marshall and TRACO, in engineered-to-order manufacturing, deployed Solix EDMS for Oracle E-Business Suite archiving to trim their DB size in Bill of Material and Order Management systems on their production servers and experienced immediate benefits in the shop floor through better application performance. These examples prove the point that Archiving helps to avoid a hit on the company’s top line revenue figures.

Archiving is a pain killer for an organization, not a vitamin providing a short term panacea. If the CIO is the custodian of company data, let him Archive it. Archiving achieves business agility with a high ROI and should be a top priority project in a recession-hit economy.