It began as a good year like all New Years do. At least for Solix it did. Early on the year, we entered new markets – and continued that through the year with customer acquisitions in Eastern Europe, support of JD Edwards archiving and application sunsetting, support of DB2 on both IBM’s i-series and z/OS and strengthened our partnerships through our integrations with Oracle’s Universal Online Archive and HDS HCAP But it was a Bad Year. The US economy tumbled and the global economy crashed. Retailers have already reported the worst year in history and many lost their jobs and their homes. Bankruptcies led to the fall of many big names. For the IT industry, it was tough times as decisions took longer and there was pressure on prices and margins. It was an Ugly Year. The Mumbai tragedy was horrific. The scene of the ugliest carnage – the Taj Hotels – also happened to be one of our customers. We pray for all the victims and their families. Talking about ugliness, the Madoff scandal could not have come at a worse time.

I am sure we are all desperately looking forward to the New Year –and hoping that the worst is behind us. There’s a lot of hope and expectations. But it will be a U – rather than a V recovery, and we need to prepare ourselves for that. The new US administration, taking office on 20^th January, is talking about structural changes through a “ new energy and environment plan”. The gestation period may be long but the rewards would be ever lasting. Along with many in the IT industry, we too are doing our bit in helping to create Green IT Centers and we will continue investing in this area.

We will soon announce our new Release. It will have a number of industry-unique enhancements in Data Privacy, Long Term Data Retention, support of industry vertical applications and SaaS-enabled features. We will closely follow the trajectory of Cloud Computing. Still in its infancy, we do believe the current economic climate would accelerate its adoption. Once that happens, Data Management would become a critical support function.

In a difficult year, we grew. For that we thank our customers. Many of you were great references. And that means a lot in our business. To our partners – who enabled a market reach that otherwise would just not have been possible – we thank you for your support. To the Solix team – thank you for making our customers happy.

And this is to wish all – our colleagues, customers, partners a great year ahead of us.

It’s been a few years since the debate started on software licensing. And the consensus appears to be that acquiring perpetual licenses is on a downward trend. (I guess it’s still too early to call for its eventual demise). Customers are demanding fast and easily measurable ROI on their enterprise software deployments; the software industry is responding with either open source or utility-pricing.

Moving toward utility-pricing is not surprising at a time when the IT industry is going through structural changes. It started first with Application Service Providers (ASPs) or On-Demand, which some like to call; which mutated later to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. And lately there’s another trend emerging: Cloud Computing for infrastructure with a completely new player as a leader – Amazon.

All most interesting and something we had thought about when we were architecting our then new Release 4.0 back in fall 2006. We incorporated the basics to deploy our software in a SaaS environment, or at least make it possible for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to offer data management services using our product on a rental basis on a pay-as-you-go model. The software allows metered pricing and is multi-tenanted.

Over the last eighteen months, we have developed this further and built maturity to it and now we have begun offering on a utility-pricing model, with one key difference. For a utility, you pay more as your consumption grows even if it is sometimes on a reducing rate per unit. In our case, the more you archive the less you pay – in absolute terms.

It’s a pricing model we believe would be attractive in current economic conditions and would be trend setter for rest of the computing industry, perhaps even for the utilities.

For us, it provides a predictable and steady cash flow rather than a series of bell curves of peaks during Quarter-ends and troughs in between. Having doubled our market share in the last two years, we believe utility-pricing will help us double our market share again –this time in 12 months; but more importantly would offer our customers a predictable ROI with their operating budgets when getting capital budget approvals is getting increasingly difficult.