Solix – Data Governance from Archiving to AI

Solix has four distinct strands of software business: enterprise archiving/application retirement, data lake, data security and content services. All are based on a common data platform, which includes metadata that is shared across the various Solix applications. Solix has a robust data catalog that enables it to provide support for data governance, data security and compliance with industry regulations. It is built on Solix’s Common Data Platform which can be deployed either in the cloud or on-premise or in a hybrid configuration. About half their customers deploy on the cloud and half on premises or in a hybrid deployment. In practice the degree of cloud deployment varies by industry, with certain industries moving rapidly to cloud, while others may never do so fully due to security or other concerns.

Fig 1 – Solix Common Data Platform

One particular issue that Solix specialises in is data retention. Large enterprises have an ever-growing amount of data that they need to manage, and through Solix they can define archiving rules for either structured or unstructured data. For example, a rule might define that data should be archived once it is (say) seven years old, and placed on lower-cost storage. Similarly, some applications may be retired but the data may still need to be accessed in certain circumstances, then have policy-based disposal.

Fig 2 – Enterprise business records

A key element in archiving is creating Enterprise Business Records. These are an end-user view of a complete business object combining structured and unstructured data powering self service data access via full text search, real-time reporting and interactive Forms and SQL queries. These give a complete view of a business object like “customer” or “patient” and the archived data associated with them.  Solix allows searches across applications in the repository and this can provide a single view across structured and unstructured data associated with that business record. The Solix data catalog has a business glossary built in and also has support for data lineage.

Customer Quotes

“We see a 50 to 60 percent performance improvement in our nightly batch processing, with no SQL tuning at all.”
Angelic Gibson, Director of IT Operations, ATD

“The Solix database archival solution improved service quality by optimising processing time in our production environment, exceeding our levels of expectation.”
Vladimir Šac IT Operations Department T-Hrvatski Telekom

Data privacy is a focus area for Solix. Sensitive data discovery can be carried out within Solix’s Common Data Platform as well as across enterprise sets of data. Once identified, sensitive data can be masked if need be, and compliance rules can be established. For example for some audit purposes, you might want to access certain data but redact parts of it. You may need to, say, obfuscate phone numbers within training data, so in such a case real names may be changed and phone numbers obscured. Data can be masked according to precise rules defined in the catalog. Masking can be applied to both structured and unstructured data.

Solix manages archived data via its repository and ensures that this data can still be searched and accessed when needed, for example in the case of an audit or for compliance reporting. A library of commonly accessed reports of archived data can be built up, with Solix having a “virtual printer” that can revisit prior month-end reporting or compliance reporting. This feature can be used when retiring applications, and retaining common reports into the SOLIXCloud archive repository.  This allows for common reports to be made available in their original form, without any application dependency.

SOLIXCloud Enterprise Data Lake, an innovative new third generation cloud data platform to help customers manage, mine and monetize their enterprise data assets, is highly scalable and now delivers end-to-end data integration and data engineering solutions for both new and existing customers.  Some companies will have multiple data lakes, which need managing, so having a data catalog of assets, with federated data governance, can help you do this.

Solix also has support for AI in the form of machine learning and generative AI tools. These are examined in detail in a separate Bloor Research report.

Solix competes primarily with Informatica, OpenText, IBM and Archive360. It has several strands of product lines, so the exact competitors in any given situation will depend on the particular context e.g. a data catalog and compliance solution will have different competitors from a pure archiving solution. In the case of data governance, Solix may compete more with products like Collibra or Alation.

The bottom line

Solix has a well-established data management solution that has hundreds of customer deployments. It is particularly strong in data archiving and has a quite functional data catalog solution that includes data lineage support and a business glossary. It is a product worth considering for data governance solutions, particularly if data retention is a key requirement.