Improving Application Performance With Solix Database Archiving Solutions

1) What are the problems if data is not archived?

Databases have grown far larger than envisioned by their creators and are filled with unneeded data. Many companies, therefore, are seeking to pare them down to the essentials and archive little used content.

“Data is growing at 125 percent a year yet up to 80 percent of this data remains inactive in production systems where it cripples performance,” sad Charlie Garry, senior program director at Meta Group. “To compound this problem, many enterprises are in the midst of compliance initiatives that require the retention of more data for longer periods of time, as well as consolidation projects that results in significant data growth.”

Database systems which have not adopted data archiving face a lot of problems like rising storage costs and lower performance. They continue storing unneeded data that has no value after certain time. They maintain these unwanted data, which includes maintaining the server thus increasing the storage cost.

Here is an instance of a company, which used data archiving to improve it’s performance and while at the same copying with the rigors of global compliance issues: Tektronix Inc. of Beaverton, Ore., focuses on test measurement and monitoring products. All company financial data resides in one huge Oracle database. Previously, Tektronix operated 486 different legacy systems internationally. Countries like Japan, India and China utilized complex systems and unique character sets. “Every legacy system required its own hardware, software and IT resources,” said Lois Hughes, senior business systems analyst for Tektronix. “As we kept adding countries, we magnified the complexity.”

Tektronix current production environment involves Oracle 10.7 running in all countries. This means two instances of Oracle:

1) Oracle Financials for accounts payable (AP), General Ledger (GL), and other transactional systems running on a Sun UE5000 database server with 8 x 336 MHz processors and 3 GB of memory. This instance is 35 GB

2) Oracle Customer Fulfillment — invoicing, accounts receivable (AR) etc. This production database is approximately 85 GB and consists of a Sun UE6000 box with 12 x 248 MHz processors and 6 GB memory. It also includes a forms server — a Sun S2000 with 10 x 60 MHz processors and 2 GB of memory.

This system experiences a fairly constant traffic volume of about 800 concurrent sessions throughout every part of the day and night. Hughes notes that the fewer the number of instances for Oracle financials, the lower the costs. Standardization also meant that the company could improve its level of customer responsiveness, gain worldwide inventory visibility and reduce worldwide IT expenditures. The monthly closing of financials can now be done in three and a half days.

However, this philosophy brought its own set of problems. The database soon expanded to 60 GB, rising at a rate of 1.25 GB per month. Performance began to suffer. “Despite tuning exercises and hardware upgrades, the increased growth rate caused performance to decline,” said Hughes. “Run times for batch programs increased despite fewer numbers of executions.”

Faced with rising storage costs and lower performance, the company investigated data usage patterns. It realized that running all data from all time periods in one system was slowing down current transactional traffic. Over time, data usage declined sharply. Yet users reported that simple queries of current transactions took ages — enough time to go for a coffee, have a chat and then return to your terminal to view the results.

2) Different solutions:

Data can be organized or stored for backup. Through tiered storage, snapshotting, backup-to-disk, and/or virtual tape libraries, backing up and recovering data has improved dramatically from the old standard process of backing up directly from primary disk to tape (and hopefully being able to locate and recover from tape back to disk when needed).

Data can also be archived, where the records are removed from the production systems and are preserved or kept for easy access and reference until the retention has expired or the data stored has no more business value.

Below given is the solution adopted by the above company to solve it’s problem’s: Tektronix compared the costs and potential results obtainable from its two routes forward,

a) Keep buying disks, networks, servers, processes and people or

b) Implement best practices to manage data growth via intelligent archiving.

As b) appeared to be the most attractive, the IT department’s first inclination was to utilize its own resources and existing software. They looked at purging as the best option for reducing the data footprint.

However, international finance regulations meant that purging would have to be paralleled by archiving. Hughes reports that Oracle itself possessed several bugs in its purging functions. The company attempted to develop its own purge/archive software. But when management realized that could take two years, it looked elsewhere. The goal was to be able to manage data by country, while at the same time centralizing it. As well as the differing languages and character sets, many countries have wildly divergent data retention regulations.

The company adopted a data archiving system, which functioned in conjunction with Oracle to purge and archive data. Hughes successfully embarked upon a pilot project to solicit buy-in for corporate wide international adoption.

As a result, the company now carries out archiving of transactional data every three months. Initially, information is recategorized (reduces in priority within the same Oracle instance, then moved to a less expensive infrastructure. The users, however, are able to access all data from one screen without headache. The results: improved database efficiency from the end user perspective in terms of queries and reports; reduced storage requirements; data retention is now fully compliant by country; and reduced time to backup.”Queries are now instant,” said Hughes. “Overall, we have benchmarked a 46-percent improvement in our financial performance by implementing archiving.”

3) What is Solix solution and why is it better?

The Solix Data Archiving Approach

The Solix Technologies Enterprise Data Management Suite leverages a common metadata repository to organize, retain, secure and manage enterprise information. The EDMS foundation is the Enterprise Metadata Manager, which captures metadata from packaged enterprise and custom applications as well as several databases. This enables database administrators to map metadata between applications and define conversion rules used as the basis for policy-based archiving. The mapping construct also ensures that the archived information can still be accessed by the primary application and database. A central location for metadata provides organizations with the necessary foundation to more effectively manage information—especially databases and associated applications—by enabling administrators to establish retention policies and quickly locate content that has been archived and secured.

The core Solix Enterprise Metadata Manager creates a central knowledgebase by analyzing the customer’s environment, which can be supplemented by pre-populated modules and tables provided by Solix’s Enterprise Data Archiving for Oracle E-Business Suite and other business applications. For example, Solix enables Oracle customers to see the various data growth rates of all application modules, such as General Ledger or Accounts Payable. After this initial assessment, customers can determine specific classification policies and templates that need to be created to manage the information more effectively.

Solix Enterprise Data Archiving includes retention solutions for Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle PeopleSoft, Oracle JD Edwards and custom applications. This wide range of support enables seamless extraction and movement of database information amongst all tiers of data storage, while simultaneously ensuring the data can be accessed for query or reporting purposes by the various applications.

Conclusion:

It has become evident that organizations are realizing the importance of archiving and are adopting data archiving technology, which not only has many advantages like reducing costs, securing data but it can also increase your productivity.

Solix EDMS is a management system that restores application performance across your enterprise with the new standard in data archiving. Built to address the most pressing challenges of enterprise data growth, Solix Enterprise Data Archiving solves compliance, cost and performance requirements with advanced archiving technology. With Solix Enterprise Data Archiving, organizations can classify data, configure and execute archiving and data migration routines and ensure data remains secure at every step of the process giving you back complete & streamlined control over your enterprise data.

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Do i really need project management software?

What actually project management means? It means to plan, organize and manage resources to achieve goal and objective of the project. It is a way to successfully apply your knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities in order to meet the requirements of a project. But does it imply that successful project needs the best methodology or manpower? Or does it require something more than that like finishing the project in stipulated time frame, within budget and with excellence as well. But you would definitely need good resources to achieve all this. Here comes in the utility of project management software to overcome many of all these problems. Let’s validate some information that might be quite helpful.

• Manage easy and quick way: – At times some management methodologies are very time-consuming being traditional. In dynamic business world, you need agility to stay alive. Quick decision needs to be taken as to avoid time lapse. For all this, you must have the latest, accurate and quick information at your disposal all the time. The Project management software meets this entire requirement.

• Team collaboration and planning: – Planning is critical aspect of any project. Proper planning should be done before the actual work starts. But there are always last time makeovers before the implementation. To implement your planning successfully, you need team collaboration at every level. Every task should be properly handled and reviewed at each level. Online project management software caters to all these task management and team collaboration.

• Hassle free communications: – Make sure that project objectives, requirements and deliverables are all communicated and agreed to the team members. Communication should flow hassle free. Project managers, team members, clients and stakeholders should communicate with each other not only at one platform from any particular location in the world but also with an ease. Their comments, decisions, views and ideas should be properly recorded which could be referred to in future also.

• Knowledge sharing: - This is hard to achieve, but for for long term success, you must encourage your team to do that because information is the most valuable asset for which there is no need for any magic tools. In such situations, Proofhub would be a good start. Any team member can refer the online centralized knowledge bank which is available 24/7 i.e. 24 hours and even 365 days.

• Excellence, Time-line and budget – It refers to WHY (project business case), WHAT (project description) and HOW (project map) in project management. Every project manager must learn to leverage these in which your experience (good or bad) will be your best instructor.

• Save Time and Money: – There is no need to be location specific for latest updates or to share any information. You can share all the necessarily data files and documents centrally. It gets automatically backed up. It facilitates you to upload from any remote location while on the move, with the basic requirement of an internet connection only.

I am sure that every project manager and an individual has his own experience, rules, methods and techniques to make his project successful; what rules do you follow? Be successful and keep Proofhub with you.

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Sales Contact Management Software

Seamless communication is the basis of any effective business process, and when it’s about sales people, the need to keep the customers’ contact list up-to-date becomes a paramount importance. Sales Contact Management Software is an effective help to Salesforce and helps in managing and exchanging information easily. Available as web or online applications, Sales Contact Management manage the records with ease.

These softwares are easy to configure and quick to use. It just needs a simple login and one can use it seamlessly. These days, many companies offer Contact Management Systems that provide customized as well as ready softwares to enable sales persons to view and manage their business at a fast pace. With the help of Contact Management Software, companies can streamline the following things with ultimate ease:

Organize Emails- Systematize sent and received emails of all the individuals who visits your website. The applications offer the facility to automatically import the contact information collected from inquiry forms, quote proposals and order forms into the contact database. They also allow email auto-responder service.

Track and Manage Sales Leads- Analyze the business leads by segmenting your contact database by fields such as country, state, city, industry, solution, project type, etc

Prioritize your Tasks- Prioritize your tasks to completion by making follow up notes of your activities and pushing your actions to result. Manage communication efforts and track sales opportunity by doing the first things first.

Schedule Meetings and Business Plans- Arrange appointments and meetings, synthesize and streamline communications by scheduling plans with customers and clients.

This out-of-the-edge software really helps the sales and marketing executives to maximize their time-to-market and reach their desired sales goals. Many companies offer online Sales Contact Management Software that can be integrated with other robust CRM Solutions and offer great scalability.

All-in-all, Sales Contact Management Software is an effective, fast and reliable way to keep pace with sales-critical business requirements in real time and helps improve important business decisions.

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Affiliates: Affiliate Tracking Software Review – Affiliate Wiz

If you are an online business owner, especially one that specializes in the selling of merchandise or services, you may be interested in starting your own affiliate program. For years now, affiliate programs have helped a large number of business owners increase their sales. With the right amount of ambition, money, and software, your business can experience those same benefits.

Before you can understand what is needed to join an affiliate program, you will need to know how one works. When starting your own affiliate program, you will recruit website owners who have a website that is, in one way or another, related to yours. This relation may include a similar topic or an issue that connects the two together.  Once you have found a website owner who is willing to do business with you, they will then place your advertisements on their webpage. These advertisements will direct internet users to your online website, whether it be an online store or not. That direction may, in many cases, result in a sale. 

To properly compensate the website owner, often referred to as an affiliate, you will need a way to determine if and when their website visitors purchased something from your online website. To do this, an affiliate tracking software is used. These tracking software programs will let you know when the sale took place and, if compensation is required, it will let you know how much compensation is needed.  As you can easily see, affiliate tracking software is important and vital to the successful operating of an affiliate program.

If you are interested in starting your own affiliate program, you will need to find affiliate tracking software. Online, you will find that there are a number of these programs available. In your search for the perfect affiliate tracking software, you may come across a program that is known as Affiliate Wiz. Affiliate Wiz is one of the many tracking programs that you will be able to find online.  Affiliate Wiz has a couple of different software programs available. There is a little bit of difference between the two programs, but one is mostly just an updated version of the other. 

Before examining the software features provided by Affiliate Wiz, you will need to determine whether or not the software can even be installed on your computer.  Affiliate Wiz’s latest version requires that your computer have, at least, Windows 2000 and it must have a .NET framework. If this affiliate tracking software program is compatible with your computer, you will want to learn a little bit more about the program before making a final purchase decision.

One of the many things that you should want to know is how the software works to record and monitor your customer’s internet activity, namely how they arrived at your online store or website. With Affiliate Wiz, your affiliates, the website owners you partnered with, will be given special links and banners. In those banners is a code that will be used monitor and track all sales.  This also requires the monitoring of a consumer’s computer activity through cookies. These two pieces of information are used to determine whether or not one of your affiliates helped to lead your customer to you. In addition to outlining this information, Affiliate Wiz will also document the event and how much the sale as worth.  This will enable to you determine, by your preset percentage, how much your affiliate will make. 

When searching for affiliate tracking software, it is also important to examine the services and the features that each program has to offer. Like most other affiliate tracking software, Affiliate Wiz has a fairly large number of available services and features, which are all included in the cost of service.  These features include, but are not limited to, detailed financial reports, varied levels of commission for different affiliates, link and banner support, and customer support. 

If Affiliate Wiz sounds like an affiliate tracking software program that you can benefit from, you are encouraged to visit their online website. This website can be found at http://www.affiliatewiz.com. By examining Affiliate Wiz’s online website, you should be able to learn additional information, including the software cost.

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Execute Powerful Marketing Campaigns Using CRM Software

Using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in your business can give you great gains in marketing effectiveness. Ineffective marketing is to send the same marketing message to every one of your leads or customers. Effective marketing is to customise each message being spoken to your customers and leads depending on the information you know about them.

CRM software gives you the benefit of automating your marketing. This makes you more efficient, and helps you to gain this new level of effectiveness in your marketing.

Customers are smart, they need to be, as they are bombarded with all kinds of marketing messages throughout a single day. Customers have developed a built-in filter to filter out messages that they don’t care much about. How are you going to communicate to them effectively? How can you make sure they take notice of you?

CRM software holds important information about your customers and leads. As each customer makes contact with your organisation, your CRM software can keep a record of the details of the conversation, including their interests and the problems they want solved. Problems that need solving equals sales, you can use this information to effectively market to your customers, tell them how you can solve their problems and walk away with the sale.

Let’s use a simple example. As a part of your business you provide technical support for the product that you sell. When a customer contacts you, CRM software will track whether the customer was calling for technical support. Over the course of a year, your business probably handled hundreds, maybe thousands of technical support related queries.

Continuing the example, you find out of your great service, your business is expanding. Based on customer feedback, you decide to add a section to your website that features a knowledge base that acts as a first point of call for customers needing help. Having this new offering helps to lower the number of technical support queries your staff need to handle, and it assists customers in having their query answered quickly.

Now, you realise that this is a great marketing opportunity! Customers want to know that you’re looking after them, and building them a knowledge base is just the type of thing that you want them to feel good about. You want them to know you’re looking after them.

The old, ineffective way of marketing would be to draft an email and send out the same email to all of your customers. All of your customers would sure know about your new knowledge base, but surely you can make more of this opportunity! If you’re using CRM software, it would contain information about your customer history that you can use to personalise your message.

Using the new, effective way of marketing and your trusty CRM software, you could give a special message for customers who have called for technical support in the last year. An example of this message might be:

“Thank you for calling us this year for technical support for the product XYZ. We hope that we were able to give you the help you needed at the time. We have been listening carefully to our customers, and realised that we have had multiple customers are call with the same question! Responding to this feedback, we have created an online knowledge base just for you. This means that you can get your problems solved quicker in the future!”

CRM software can help you to find a list of these particular customers through its built-in search functionality. This will give you a targeted marketing message to these particular customers. Effective marketing like this lets customers know that you’re really paying attention to them, and that you value their business and their time.

Of course, you’d still want your other customers to know about your new feature:

“We’ve noticed that you haven’t needed to contact us for technical support this year. However, we would still love to hear from you if you have any problems. If you do need technical support in the future, we have created a knowledge base on our website to resolve your problem as fast as possible. We know that your time is precious, so we want to make sure that we help you get back on track as soon as possible.”

By investing in CRM software for you business, you can increase the effectiveness of your marketing, and that means more sales and happier customers!

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