Solix, a leading provider of data management and integration solutions, recently presented at the 54th IT Press Tour, sharing insights on how their solutions can help developers, engineers and architects organize business data and optimize infrastructure. With a mission to “organize the world’s business information with optimized infrastructure, data security, analytics and artificial intelligence”, Solix focuses on enabling the data-driven enterprise.
Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, Solix has grown to 350 employees worldwide. As CEO John Ottman explained, “Almost everything we’ve been able to achieve is a function of working with clients on projects. All of our products are pretty much developed that way. We like to work with our clients on a very collaborative basis.”
Customer base
This collaborative approach has led to an impressive client base of Fortune 2000 companies in industries as diverse as insurance, banking, consumer products and healthcare—companies with large amounts of data to manage. The customer list reflects mostly the Fortune 2000. According to Ottman. “Mostly big banks and big insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies and people with a lot of data, which I guess is everybody.”
Solix Common Data Platform
The core of the Solix solution suite is the Solix Common Data Platform (CDP). This end-to-end enterprise data structure provides comprehensive metadata management, data governance and data discovery capabilities. CDP can connect to and collect data from hundreds of different sources.
“Most importantly, the Solix Common Data Platform can collect any data from anywhere,” explained Ottman. “It talks to mainframes, IoT data, social data, structured ERP data, files and random files. It’s designed to collect it all.”
Key solution areas
Once the data is entered, Solix places the applications and solutions on top of the CDP:
- Company archiving optimizes infrastructure by archiving and retiring legacy data and applications. Ottman noted, “To optimize your infrastructure, the best practice is to put current data systems like SAP HANA databases on as much current data as possible—data that’s one to two years old. Take the rest of the data and move it somewhere else so you can manage costs effectively.”
- The Enterprise Data Lake enables the integration and pipeline of data into various downstream systems for analytics, business intelligence, AI/ML and more.
- Business content services provides secure, compliant and low-cost file storage, archiving and collaboration.
Data management and security
Data management is a key area of focus. “Providing a consistent set of controls across the entire data platform is one of the key functionalities and benefits we bring to our customers,” explained VP of Services Russ Puryear. Solix provides centralized data management that encompasses data classification, security, information lifecycle management, compliance, monitoring and auditing/reporting.
Data masking is another critical capability for protecting sensitive data. Solix can scan and classify sensitive data so that it is appropriately masked in further use.
Future improvements
Looking ahead, Solix will expand its management capabilities even further. “In a future release, we’ll be releasing what we call federal governance,” Puryear said. “The concept of being able to apply data set management outside of our platform is coming in our next release. Some people call it virtualization.”
Flexibility of implementation
Solix solutions are built on a modern, scalable architecture that uses microservices and containers. They can be deployed on public, private or local bare servers. Solix Cloud, their SaaS offering, is also seeing rapid 70%+ annual growth.
Multi-tenancy is another critical capability. “Very, very large customers that operate in multiple regions of the world with hundreds of thousands of employees — one of the common ways they set this up is a center of excellence where they establish our platform,” Ottman explained. “Then they sell that internally in their organization and sign up tenants in a multi-tenant model.”
Conclusion
In short, Solix provides a comprehensive and flexible set of data management and integration solutions suitable for large enterprises looking to harness the power of their data. With a collaborative approach, modern architecture and robust data governance, Solix appears well positioned to help more organizations become data-driven. Developers, engineers and architects dealing with complex, big data challenges should consider evaluating how Solix can help them tame their data chaos.