Solix: Product-driven Service Strategy

80 percent of the data on an enterprise’s systems is active only 20 percent of the time.

In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, observing that twenty percent of the people owned eighty percent of the wealth. The 80/20 Rule or the Pareto Principle means that in anything a few (20 percent) are vital and many (80 percent) are trivial. Angel investor and entrepreneur-at-heart Sai Gundavelli is founding his business on a parallel to the famed Pareto principle: that eighty percent of the data on an enterprise’s systems is active only twenty percent of the time. This observation prompted him to develop his first enterprise product: the ARCHIVEjinni, a seemingly magical wand that dispels the woes of expensive archiving of enterprise data. The tool is being successfully implemented; a good point in itself. But what is more impressive is Gundavelli’s climb up the value chain.

Solix, founded in 1995, saw a quick ramp-up in business as the consulting industry proliferated. Yet, the ever-watchful Gundavelli was not misled by the seemingly unending growth curve of the company. “As the enterprise applications market matured and consolidated, we needed differentiators to stay on the cutting edge,” says Gundavelli. He carved an engineering team out of his resource pool and pushed for research-based innovation-all focused on enterprise pain points that could be solved by Solix’s products or technologies. And when the boom was over, Gundavelli was ready with Solix’s new avatar.

SAI GUNDAVELLI: SERIAL INCUBATOR

In the early nineties, Cisco deputed a team of engineers to research the next-generation ERP. Sai Gundavelli was a team-member. The young Gundavelli dug deeper into the ERP space and realized the potential of the market. In 1995, he formed Solix to capitalize on the opportunity. Here again, the entrepreneur realized that technology alone didn’t generate revenues, it was the decision-makers: CIOs, CTOs, CFOs, who were driving the business. The smart Gundavelli used his consulting team’s strengths to incubate technology products that could target these “C” level executives’ business pain points. And thus:

Emagia: An enterprise cash-flow management software company that enabled medium-to-large enterprises streamline and automate their cash flow. Now funded by Sigma, Westbridge, B Cubed and Solix.

Digiprise: An on-demand e-business solutions company (see siliconindia, December 2003)

Siti: An enterprise recruiting management software company, offering processing capabilities offshore.

“With ERP becoming business-as-usual in any industry, data was bound to grow, and it did,” says Gundavelli. “Today, three unique pain points play a big role in enterprise efficiency-archiving, upgrading and migrating data.” Meta Group estimates the market for database archiving software will grow from less than $1 billion today to $4 billion by the end of 2007. The Sarbanes-Oxley regulations have mandated that companies archive their databases for 14 years, an exercise that promises great pain and jeopardizing applications’ performance and stability, resulting in longer time for system backups, instance cloning, patch applications, disaster recovery and slower running of concurrent programs and online queries. EMC has acquired companies in the email and document management spaces to archive emails and content. The plan is to offer archiving services for unstructured data to its clients this year. Solix extends the archiving framework to include structured data in enterprise applications for Data Lifecycle Management.

With the big players sitting up and taking notice of this nascent field, Gundavelli feels that his pitch is quite timely. “In database archiving, the software needs to be able to find and migrate individual rows of data to another source rather than the file-level migrations most hierarchical storage management products use,” observes the Solix CEO, “Which is where we win.” ARCHIVEjinni-Gundavelli’s penchant for magical nomenclatures is evident here and in the other two Solix products-delivers a reliable application data management solution that eliminates the perils of rapid data accumulation. It relocates data that is no longer needed for routine transaction processing, from production instance to archive instance and then intelligently provides simultaneous real-time access to both. The result is a high performance and highly stable production environment. ARCHIVEjinni with its ARCHIVEjinni Interoperable Layer (AIL) and a rich underlying scalable architecture is a technically advanced solution for enterprise data management,” says Dinu Joshi, Vice President Engineering, Solix. Enterprise customers include big names such as Western Gas and Robertson Ceco.

Two other areas Gundavelli is focusing on are upgrades and migrations. Not surprisingly, Solix has built UPGRADEjinni (that bottled spirit again!) around Oracle’s numerous releases. AMR Research’s studies note that any ERP upgrade is done with great caution by enterprises. “ERP upgrades are a core strategic asset and a necessity to stay ahead of the curve. Labeled as big-ticket projects, ERP upgrades require a compelling business case, and adding functionality is the easiest way to build that case,” says Judy Bijesse, Research Director, AMR Labs. “Continual attention and investment is required to maximize the value of an ERP system and to ensure it keeps up with the ever-changing business environment.” Most enterprises have taken an incremental approach by upgrading only certain functional areas-;an expensive proposition involving time consuming

Data Migration, which has been labeled the most difficult phase of any upgrade project.

UPGRADEjinni enables seamless data migration across multiple Oracle versions and automates the entire customizations upgrade process.

Prior to this, it simulates a test environment for data migration to test data integrity and validate conversion. UPGRADEjinni brings rich knowledge base of more than 20,000 entries that have chronological specification of the schema change in the Oracle Applications including latest point releases and family pack releases. It includes this knowledge base with functionality to parse the customizations to report precise source code changes required for their successful upgrade. The tool is particularly useful when customers require business re-engineering, changes in Chart Of Accounts and instance consolidation, which are humungous tasks without a tool. A slew of customers have signed on for the toolkit, including Cypress Semiconductor, Wind Corp, General Dynamics, Forbes Marshall, Eaton and others. “We chose Solix for UPGRADEjinni’s demonstrated capabilities to accelerate the upgrade and consolidation of our global Oracle Application instances” says Oliver Weber, Director Internal Audit and Business Systems, Cypress Semiconductor Corporation.

The third pain point Gundavelli is attacking is the ERP migration. In 2003 alone, two large ERP platforms merged. JD Edwards was bought over by PeopleSoft for a whopping $1.7b, while BAAN was sold to a venture capital group for a measly $135m. This has changed the ERP market itself considerably. Installed base of JD Edwards and Baan require rapid migration to the next ERP platform. Yankee Group reported that while the JD Edwards acquisition improved PeopleSoft’s market position, the beleaguered Pleasanton, CA-based company has only 18 months to migrate the acquisition to its own architecture. “Duct-tape migration is all too common,” observes Gundavelli. In response to this flux, Solix has engineered MIGRATEjinni, a toolkit for platform migration.

© 2004, Solix is a registered trademark of Solix Technologies Inc.
* As reported to SEI by Dec 2003.

NASSCOM India endorses Solix’ ARCHIVEjinni software

Hyderabad, 8 June 2004 – National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) endorses ARCHIVEjinni, an advanced enterprise application archiving solution from Solix Technologies, as a reliable resource to its members for their application data archiving and storage management needs.

This is a major step towards relieving enterprises of the growing problems of rapidly accumulating data in Oracle applications. The enterprises need their applications to be free of indolent historical data and require to establish procedures and mechanisms to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information at all times for quick decision making and smooth flow of operations, and to ensure efficient backups and data recovery.

The NASSCOM selected Solix’ ARCHIVEjinni solution after a lengthy evaluation, because of the robustness of its design and capabilities in managing enterprise application data. “Solix’ solutions can help any business in improving the efficiency and reliability of their enterprise applications,” says Samit Mandal, Director Alliances, Solix. The NASSCOM’s featuring of the quality and breadth of Solix’ ARCHIVEjinni is a strong validation of the company’s prowess in developing viable solutions that support enterprise applications data management.

“Solix is the only Oracle Certified Advantage Partner with an enterprise application data archiving solution and now this featuring of the ARCHIVEjinni by NASSCOM bolsters our investments and efforts in product research.” says Sai Gundavelli, President & CEO, Solix Technologies.

Solution Summary

ARCHIVEjinni provides a cost-effective and long-term solution to the problem of accelerating data growth by relocating inactive data that is no longer needed for immediate operations, from production to archive schema and using the patent pending ARCHIVEjinni Interoperable Layer (AIL) intelligently provides simultaneous access to both. The archived data is housed on the same or different servers using flexible data management strategies resulting in high-performance and highly stable production environment.

Solix initiates India OAUG

Hyderabad, 3 May 2004: Solix initiates the IndiaOAUG, the new regionalized group (Geo) of Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) open to all Oracle Applications software users in India. The group has started with representations from 15 companies that are leaders in their respective industries, scattered across India.

IndiaOAUG will provide an open forum for attendees to discuss a wide range of topics including Release 11i, application migration, data growth issues, storage, networking, business intelligence, system administration updates, software requirements impacting and compliance issues related to Oracle Applications.

The Geo will lay the roadmap for improvements and the future enhancements in Oracle Applications, with the objective of ensuring continuous and extended support. “The India OAUG will focus on maximizing the benefits offered by Oracle by way of networking, training and support through a wide range of activities including conferences and seminars,” said Samit, Director Alliance, Solix Technologies and also the founder member and chief coordinator for IndiaOAUG.

The Geo meetings will be organized with the support of Geo Board of Directors, including key user volunteers of senior management levels from member companies and key managers from Oracle. The meetings will include workshops, educational sessions and presentations, organized through a collective effort, coordinated by Samit Mandal. Member companies will be encouraged to offer suggestions for meeting topics and may be selected to present an overview of their company and an insight into their Oracle Applications use.

Western Gas Solves Data Growth Issues With ARCHIVEjinni

Sunnyvale, Feb 2004 – Western Gas Resources, Inc. (WGR) was using Oracle Application R11.0.3 and planning an upgrade to the Release 11i. Many of the transaction tables had millions of records, a large percentage of which was inactive considering that WGR had been actively using the system since October 1993. This severely impacted the application performance. In addition, due to the foreseen increase in data volume of over 40% with Oracle R11i, WGR realized that they would be required to significantly upsize their infrastructure. While the infrastructure upgrades provided an opportunity to re-evaluate the platform, the decision to cross migrate from HP/UX to Linux only added to the associated complexities of the upgrade.

The Solution – ARCHIVEjinni™

WGR needed a solution that would be able to archive data associated with their Oracle eBusiness Suite applications. WGR chose Solix ARCHIVEjinni after a rigorous selection process that evaluated on the basis of features, functionality, support capabilities, vendor’s responsiveness and the highest ROI.

The capabilities of ARCHIVEjinni™ assured WGR of a viable solution that addresses the challenges the company faced. ARCHIVEjinni also ensured simultaneous access to both production and archived data without having to log out from the application. From a Sarbanes-Oxley perspective too, the solution made sure that all the detail of historical transaction was available.

ARCHIVEjinni™ is an enterprise data management solution that enables customers to manage their entire data lifecycle by automating the Archive and Purge process. ARCHIVEjinni is built on the Oracle eBusiness Suite technology stack and is fully integrated into the Oracle eBusiness Suite.

“Unmanaged data growth is the most dominant factor impacting the application performance and application responsiveness directly impacts the user productivity……. ARCHIVEjinni™ has the capability to isolate the user frustrations associated with deteriorating application performance. It is a program that delivers returns starting day 1 and lasts a lifetime” says Ajay Jotwani, Director, Enterprise Application Solutions.

ARCHIVEjinni™ is a smart automated management of entire data life cycle and brings substantial benefits to enterprises.

• Improvement in application performance
• Tangible cost savings compared to standard storage architectures
• Reduce upgrade/maintenance downtime
• Freed Resources of network capacity, server processing bandwidth and IT time
• Data management for statutory compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
• Effective solution for disaster recover

“By archiving the historical data, ARCHIVEjinni gave us 3 tangible benefits; significantly improved application responsiveness and reduced the application administration costs”, says Rick Brough, Manager, Database Administration, “We successfully upgraded to Release 11i.9 and migrated to Linux platform without severely impacting the business”.

WGR used the ARCHIVEjinni™ analytics to audit its instance and define the archiving strategy. The implementation of this low-cost solution improved the overall application performance by over 50%. ARCHIVEjinni™ passed the litmus test when some of the standard month end reports that took more than a day to run now runs in less than an hour.

About Western Gas Resources, Inc.

Western Gas Resources, Inc. (WGR) is a Denver based natural gas producer providing a broad range of services to its customers from the wellhead to the sales delivery point. With annual revenues exceeding $2.87 Billion in 2003, WGR is one of the fastest growing energy companies. WGR’s gas gathering network includes 10,300 miles of pipeline and its gathering, processing and treating facilities are located in major gas-producing basins in the Rocky Mountain, Mid-Continent and West Texas regions of the United States.

Solix releases ARCHIVEjinni Version 4.1

Sunnyvale, 27 January 2004: Solix Technologies, a leading provider of services and solutions that enhance enterprise applications releases the new version of ARCHIVEjinni, V4.1. with enhanced features and functionality. ARCHIVEjinni, an automated solution for enterprise application archiving and purging, enhances enterprise performance by managing the large volumes of data.

The new release includes several state of the art features.

• The new knowledgebase driven Configurator allows users to configure archive and purge routines by customizing standard Oracle routines and developing new ones to address a customer’s unique data retention requirements.
• Reports archiving enables companies to archive ‘report images’ in compliance with new Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. The feature also helps improve Apps performance by eliminating the need to generate reports more than once.
• MiniMEjinni facilitates companies to create smaller size Apps instances for testing, development, training and support environment. The MiniMEjinni leads to substantial savings on hardware resources.
• Instance Analytics analyzes in further detail space distribution by modules and identifies inactive data size facilitating companies to fine-tune their archiving strategies.

“These new release further enhances the usability of ARCHIVEjinni and the performance of Oracle Apps.” Says Dinendra Joshi, Vice President, Solix Technologies. “Our customers were looking forward to some of these features and would be truly pleased to see this new version with the improved capabilities.”

“Solix is the only Oracle Certified Advantage Partner with an enterprise data archiving solution and this has given us a lead over the competition” says Sai Gundavelli, President & CEO, Solix Technologies, Inc. “and now with substantial investments in product research and the latest release of ARCHIVEjinni V4.1, Solix will be able to address the demands of Oracle users.”

About ARCHIVEjinni

ARCHIVEjinni provides a cost-effective and long-term solution to the problem of accelerating data growth by relocating inactive data that is no longer needed for immediate operations, from production to archive schema and using the patent pending ARCHIVEjinni Interoperable Layer (AIL) intelligently provides simultaneous access to both. The archived data is housed on the same or different servers using flexible data management strategies resulting in high-performance and highly stable production environment.

Solix Technologies Achieves Highest Oracle Partner Status

SUNNYVALE, Calif. 13 January 2004 – Solix Technologies, a global leader in enterprise applications management, today announced that it has attained Oracle Certified Advantage Partner status. This Oracle Partner Network certification is the highest level of partnership with Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and reflects Solix’s skills, knowledge, and expertise.

“Being one of the first enterprise applications archiving companies to achieve CAP designation is a real competitive advantage for Solix,” said Sai Gundavelli, President & CEO, Solix Technologies.

“Solix has demonstrated success in helping customers manage their enterprise data and their CAP status reflects the company’s high level of competency, underlining years of dedication and commitment to working successfully with Oracle,” said Bronwyn Hastings, Vice President, Oracle Alliances & Channels.

This recent vote of confidence from a longtime partner of over 8 years emphasizes that Solix has the infrastructure and vision to deliver targeted enterprise application management solutions to a worldwide client-base. Our commitment to world-class partnerships translates into significant benefits for our e-business clients. Through Solix they receive unmatched service, expertise and support, while gaining access to Oracle’s worldwide technology expertise.

Designation as an Oracle Certified Partner is reserved exclusively for the most experienced Oracle PartnerNetwork members. This high-level status is achieved by meeting strict competency requirements, as defined by an exacting set of criteria. “Solix’s effort to achieve this level of partnership will bring mutual benefits to both organizations and strengthen Solix’s ability to deliver Oracle-based solutions and services to its customers.” said Bronwyn Hastings, Vice President, Oracle Alliances & Channels.

The Oracle Partner Network

The Oracle Partner Network is a global business network of more than 12,000 companies who deliver innovative enterprise software solutions based on Oracle software. Through access to Oracle’s premier products, education, technical services, marketing and sales support, the Oracle PartnerNetwork provides partners with the resources they need to be successful in today’s Internet economy. Oracle partners are able to offer customers’ leading-edge solutions backed by Oracle’s position as the world’s largest enterprise software company.

Partners who are able to demonstrate the highest level of product knowledge, technical expertise and a commitment to doing business with Oracle qualify for the Oracle Certified Advantage Partner level. These partners receive a higher level of service, support, training and certification from Oracle.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.

© 2004 Solix Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved. Solix is a trademark of Solix Technologies, Inc.

Solix Launches UPGRADEjinni Intelligent Data and Customizations Upgrade Tool

Hyderabad, October 14, 2003: Solix Technologies Ltd., a leading enterprise solutions company launches yet another product, UPGRADEjinni, following its successful release of ARCHIVEjinni in July. This is a data migration and customizations upgrade tool which includes features that enable easy reimplementation and consolidation of your data and customizations during upgrade to newer versions of Release 11i.

The product was developed at Solix’ offshore development center in Hyderabad, for the worldwide market, targeted at several thousands of Oracle Applications implementations worldwide.

Mr. Debasish Pattnaik, Country Head says, ‘The product is the outcome of several years of our experience in Oracle Application implementation and upgrade projects. Solix has come up with this solution that eases the upgrade process and ensures data security. Customers like General Dynamics in US are already using UPGRADEjinni. Our continuous success in products has strengthened our belief to invest more in product research and development’.

The data migration and customizations upgrade process during Oracle Applications upgrade is, indeed, a complicated process. It increases the cycle time for 11i upgrade and results in high application outage. UPGRADEjinni simplifies the data extraction and loading to ensure the quickest and safest possible approach to upgrade Oracle Applications. At the end, the upgrade process and availability of data are vastly enhanced.

Solix launches ARCHIVEjinni to combat data growth problems in Oracle Apps

August 4, 2003: Solix launches ARCHIVEjinni, a robust, cost-effective enterprise data archiving solution, in US. The solution intelligently archives data for improved Application performance and stability. Having gained excellence and global recognition in providing comprehensive enterprise solutions to customers across industries, Solix considered developing products that boost the performance of Oracle Applications and database.

Identifying and prioritizing data is where the enterprises tend to get bogged down. ARCHIVEjinni is a result of Solix’ understanding of the ground realities of exponential data growth that cramps the Oracle Application performance, and its investment and efforts in devising a comprehensive solution to deal with the challenges confronting Oracle Application users. Sai Gundavelli, President & CEO, Solix Technologies, Inc., says, “At this stage, a tilt towards pursuing product development to address the root causes of Oracle Application degradation is a corner stone of our strategy to ensure that we stay on track with the demands of Oracle users. Again, we know how effective our output is from what others are producing, and we believe ARCHIVEjinni will certainly make Oracle Applications more beneficial.”

ARCHIVEjinni is a highly reliable purge and archive solution that helps deal with rapid data accumulation in Oracle Applications by eliminating obstacles that limit the benefits of your application. It ensures data security by simplifying and automating data backups for disaster recovery, and significantly reducing complexities and outage in carrying out upgrade to newer versions of 11i. Besides, it enables easier and simultaneous access to historical and production data with accelerated application performance and greater data availability.

KTB go live with Oracle’s Procurement Solution – 1st Oracle live site for Oracle Sourcing11i in Asia

Bangkok, Thailand, July 2003: Oracle Corporation (Thailand) Company Limited, a subsidiary of Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) – the world’s largest enterprise software company – today announced that Thailand’s largest Government commercial banking. Krung Thai Bank Public Co., Ltd. (KTB) has successfully implemented Oracle’s Procurement Solution – a part of Oracle E-Business Suite, including Oracle iProcurement, Oracle Sourcing and Oracle Purchasing Intelligence – to improve web-based operational efficiencies and develop its business operations.

The suite, implemented by Oracle certified partner SOLIX, is the first live site for Oracle Sourcing 11i in Asia. Oracle’s Procurement Solution will help KTB develop a consistent and strategic approach to procurement.

KTB Executive Vice President Mr.Thiravat Vathanathron, said: “By utilizing Oracle’s Procurement Solution, we’ll be able to place and receive faster and smoother orders, bid online with suppliers, optimize our supply base, and achieve greater management control over procurement processes and complex negotiations. This will help us save at least 10-20% on total purchasing costs, while also helping us to drastically reduce requisition-processing costs that will help to reduce the ‘procure-to-pay cycle’ which was previously taking around one month.
“Oracle Sourcing 11i implementation will allow us to conduct online supplier auctions, support all negotiation types with robust buyer and supplier tools, with integrated spend, supplier performance and productivity analysis, as well as reducing costs when transacting volume buying.”

KTB has an estimated 9 million customers and is Thailand’s No. 1 commercial bank in terms of assets. It currently operates 617 domestic and 6 foreign branches and representative offices.

Natasak Rodjanapiches, Oracle Corporation Thailand Managing Director, said: “KTB selected Oracle Applications for its scalability, rich functionality and integrated nature. With Oracle Purchasing Intelligence, KTB will be able to monitor their procurement processes in real time mode. This strategic implementation will also help to position Oracle at the forefront of Sourcing in Asia.”

Amit Puri, Regional Managing Director, Solix Technologies Asia Pacific, added: “By leveraging Oracle’s iProcurement and Sourcing suite of applications, KTB would be able to quickly adapt to world-class supplier relationship management business practices to reduce sourcing costs and overall procure-to-pay cycle timeframe. With this successful implementation, KTB can now target to act as a central nodal exchange for various supplier and contractors to transact with Government departments in Thailand.
We believe that the Oracle Applications we’ve implemented for KTB are highly scalable solutions for cost-effective business growth, while offering ease-of-maintenance through a single code base – certainly something KTB can bank on ! “

Solix to present papers at Oracle Appsworld in London (June23-26, 2003)

April 2003: Look out over for Solix at the Oracle Appsworld 2003, as it presents papers at this prestigious worldwide Conference in London. On the agenda are two papers, one focuses on Supplier Relationship management (SRM) solution and the other on implementing of eBusiness Suite on Linux platform.

Oracle Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) Solution You Can Bank on

The paper presents a comprehensive case study on implementation of Oracle Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) solution in Krung Thai Bank (KTB), Thailand, one of the largest banks in Asia. KTB plans to host the SRM solution on Oracle Exchange Marketplace platform and offers eProcurement opportunities to varied public sector agencies. The paper speaks at length on the Oracle Sourcing, Oracle Internet Procurement and Oracle Purchasing Intelligence modules being implemented in the bank – Why they have been chosen; What KTB endeavors to achieve from the solution; How KTB pursues to fulfill its various operational needs and improve efficiency by implementing these modules.

Discuss and know for yourself if Oracle SRM is not a solution you can truly bank on!
Authors: Mohan & Dinesh Singh Panwar

Dance with the Penguins

This white paper demonstrates implementation of eBusiness Suite on Linux platform, which is fast becoming the preferred platform for hosting Oracle eBusiness Suite. Presenting a case for migrating your existing costly servers to a more economic Linux environment, the paper outlines the migration path from a non-Linux (IBM AIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris) system and highlights a recent Linux implementation. Reliability, scalability and performance parameters suggest a drastically reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for Linux systems. Use of database clustering technology, active use of standby servers and other techniques for sizing Linux systems shall also be discussed.

Time to Dance with the Penguin – Implement E-Business Suite on Linux!
Authors: Solix DBA Team & Mohan