Solix Empowers the Data-Driven Enterprise With Comprehensive Data Management and Integration Solutions

Solix, a leading provider of data management and integration solutions, recently presented to the 54th IT Press Tour, sharing insights into how their solutions can help developers, engineers, and architects organize enterprise data and optimize infrastructure. With a mission "to organize the world's enterprise information with optimized infrastructure, data security, analytics, and AI," 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 Executive Chairman John Ottman explained, "Almost everything we've been able to accomplish is a function of working with customers on projects. All of our products are pretty much developed that way. We like to engage with our customers on a very collaborative basis."

Customer Base

This collaborative approach has led to an impressive customer base of Fortune 2000 companies across industries like insurance, banking, consumer products, and healthcare — companies with large amounts of data to manage. A list of customers reflects mostly Fortune 2000. According to Ottman. "Mostly big banks and big insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and people with a lot of data, which I guess is everybody."

Solix Common Data Platform

At the core of Solix's solution suite is the Solix Common Data Platform (CDP). This end-to-end enterprise data fabric provides comprehensive metadata management, data governance, and data discovery capabilities. The CDP can connect to and collect data from hundreds of disparate sources.

"The big point is that the Solix Common Data Platform can collect any data from anywhere," explained Ottman. "It talks to the mainframes, IoT data, social data, structured ERP data, files, and random files. It's designed to collect all that."

Key Solution Areas

Once the data is ingested, Solix layers applications and solutions on top of the CDP:

1. Enterprise Archiving optimizes infrastructure by archiving and retiring legacy data and applications. Ottman noted, "To optimize your infrastructure, best practices are to put current data systems like SAP HANA databases on current data to the greatest extent possible - one to two years old data. Take the rest of the data and move it somewhere else so that you can efficiently manage the cost."
2. The Enterprise Data Lake allows integration and pipelining of data to various downstream systems for analytics, business intelligence, AI/ML, and more.
3. Enterprise Content Services provides secure, compliant, and low-cost file storage, archiving, and collaboration.

Data Governance and Security

Data governance is a key focus area. "Providing a consistent set of governance across the 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 governance spanning data classification, security, information lifecycle management, compliance, monitoring, and auditing/reporting.

Data masking is another critical capability for safeguarding sensitive data. Solix can scan and classify sensitive data to be appropriately masked in downstream usage.

Future Enhancements

Looking ahead, Solix will extend its governance capabilities even further. "In a future release, we are going to be releasing what we call a federated governance," said Puryear. "The concept of being able to apply governance to datasets outside our platform is coming in our next release. Some people also call it virtualization."

Deployment Flexibility

Solix's solutions are built on a modern, scalable architecture leveraging microservices and containers. They can be deployed in public, private, or on-premises bare metal servers. The 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 that they set this up is with a center of excellence where they establish our platform," explained Ottman. "Then they sell it marketed internally in their organization and sign up tenants in a multi-tenant model."

Conclusion

In summary, Solix provides a comprehensive and flexible set of data management and integration solutions that are well-suited 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 to deal with complex, large-scale data challenges should consider evaluating how Solix can help them tame their data chaos.