News Analysis

A Google for internal data

We want the enterprise to manage its data better, whether it is e-mail data, customer applications or enterprise applications Sai Gundavelli President & CEO Solix Technologies

Solix Technologies is eyeing the international market for data management solutions

With business growing, enterprises are experiencing data explosion. This has lead to organisations digitising and archiving data for quick retrieval as well as to meet compliance needs. A player in this segment, Solix Technologies, provides enterprise solutions for data management.

Quoting a Gartner report, Sai Gundavelli, President and CEO of the company, says that the data management market will be worth about $4 billion by 2007. “There are just about four or five major players, and we are one of them,” he says.

Though a young company that was founded only in 1995, Solix has been able to make its presence felt in the international market and is now looking at the Indian market. The company has been concentrating solely on providing data management solutions.

Explains Gundavelli, “With time we realised that there was saturation in the enterprise application market, and that the productivity gains in implementation had already happened. But we also saw that these enterprises were producing huge amounts of data, and realised that they would soon need efficient data management systems.” Today, the company has three products in this category—Archivejinni, Upgradejinni and Migratejinni—and has acquired patents too. Not satisfied with creating unique solutions, the company has partnered with leading companies such as Oracle, HP, EMC, SAP and IBM; for instance, it is an Oracle-certified advantage partner.

Data management involves the intelligent use of hardware and software. According to Gundavelli, Solix’ solution for better data management is that data that is not used frequently can be stored in a lower-cost storage box, and data that is used regularly rests in high- performance systems. “Our objective is to seamlessly integrate both kinds of data so that they are available to the user anytime,” explains Gundavelli.

Solix has recently closed a deal for data management with Korea Telecom (the details are still being worked out). Some of its prominent clients are LG Electronics Korea, Reader’s Digest, Cisco, Sun, IBM, Sony, PwC, GE, and the government of Malaysia. The company’s Indian clients include Hindalco and Laxmi Motor Works.

The core competence of the company is its strong R&D. It currently has 200 people working at Hyderabad, a figure which in another year will rise to 500. Its strategy in the Indian market, apart from creating awareness, will be R&D, effective marketing and alliance building.

In the last two decades companies have automated their processes, bought newer applications, and accumulated a lot of data. Deleting this data will result in the loss of ability to do BI or analyse trends. However, if they do keep the data, the storage cost increases and application performance drops. This is the area that Solix plans to tap. Technologies like data scrambling are yet to gain acceptance in India; once that happens there will be an automatic increase in data management.

Gundavelli’s vision is to do for internal enterprise data what Google did for public data. “We want the enterprise to manage its data better, whether it is e-mail data, customer applications or enterprise applications,” he signs off.

shivani@expresscomputeronline.com