IT Pro Start-Up Tour: Solix

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Who are they?

Many Silicon Valley start-ups have sexy headquarters located near the tech giants that pepper the Californian landscape.

Solix only hits one of those two targets. While it sits directly opposite Yahoo’s base, there's no hint of glamour in its grey-carpeted office space – the only concession to glamour is the ubiquitous ping-pong table:

This lack of glitz is reflected in its products - data management rarely takes the headlines by storm - but their potential time and cost savings should be enough to inspire a quickening of the pulse in those in charge of IT budgets.

Because, in the nine years since its inception, Solix has been working hard to ensure businesses don't waste any funds or time on redundant information or applications.

Why should you care?

The central reason every business should care about what Solix is doing is the importance of data management in today’s world.

Essentially, Solix's solutions compress redundant data, potentially by 90 per cent.

When companies started pumping their data centres full of information years ago, few thought about how to manage the lifecycle and eventual death of that information. In particular, vendors gave little consideration on how to deal with structured data. And that’s where Solix came in.

Essentially, Solix's solutions look at what data your company is and isn’t using. Redundant data is compressed, potentially by 90 per cent, and then placed in a lower level storage tier. It’s only kept alive for the sake of compliance.

The software also "retires" applications, deciding when to kill off legacy apps. Think of it as the silicon version of Logan's Run.

Then there's data masking, which ensures sensitive bits of information are kept private when companies are shifting it around.

Although a significant bulk of its customers use the solutions for managing Oracle applications, the kit is compatible with all kinds of data. As the executives we met were keen to emphasise, Solix provides solutions for heterogeneous IT setups.

As for competition, there are few vendors in the structured data management market, but they are significant ones - HP, IBM and Informatica.

According to straight-talking, mustachioed CEO Sai Gundavelli, Solix has some real differentiators.

“We are one product, which can tackle any operating system, any application and that scales up with the infrastructure. From a technology architecture perspective I think we scale much better than the competition,” Gundavellis said.

He believes the company’s delivery models separate Solix from its rivals too.

“We provide a hardware appliance which is easy to buy, with no implementation. We also provide the pay-as-you-go model. So our delivery model to the customer is also a differentiator,” he told IT Pro

“Competitors also don’t support all the applications we do. There are newer applications which we are supporting.”

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