Sai Gundavelli, Solix Technologies, Inc. Founder and CEO: “As organizations move vast amounts of data between production and non-production environments for development, testing, and analysis, the protection of sensitive data in these non-production realms becomes paramount”

Founded in 2003 by Sai Gundavelli, Solix Technologies, Inc. emerged during the early days of enterprise search, partnering with Google to introduce innovative solutions to corporate customers. However, early customer feedback sparked a deeper realization—organizations were grappling with massive data growth and lacked the tools to fully understand, retain, and utilize their data efficiently. This insight led to the launch of Solix and its focus on enterprise application archiving and data management.

Solix Technologies quickly established itself as a pioneer in enterprise data management, addressing the critical need for businesses to optimize and secure their ever-expanding data. The company’s flagship product, the Solix Common Data Platform (Solix CDP), revolutionized the industry by unifying all types of enterprise data—legacy, inactive, and active—whether structured or unstructured, into a single, scalable, and compliant platform. This powerful solution enables organizations to improve infrastructure optimization, implement effective information lifecycle management (ILM), enhance data security, and leverage advanced analytics.

With the Solix CDP, businesses can streamline their operations by transforming how they engage with their data. Whether it’s boosting customer engagement, driving operational efficiency, or maximizing profitability, the platform supports a wide array of data-driven applications. Its ability to handle data across different environments and ensure compliance with data privacy regulations makes it a must-have for enterprises seeking to maintain both performance and security in the face of exponential data growth. Sai Gundavelli’s foresight and leadership have positioned Solix Technologies at the forefront of enterprise data management, offering solutions that not only optimize application performance but also empower businesses to unlock the full potential of their data.

As the world increasingly embraces digital transformation, Solix continues to innovate, providing businesses with the tools to stay competitive and data-driven.

In conversation with Sai Gundavelli, Founder and CEO of Solix Technologies, Inc.

Q. Solix CDP is known for unifying all types of enterprise data in a single platform. How does this integration benefit organizations in terms of operational efficiency and data-driven decision-making?

CDP provides robust data collection, governance, and preparation tools with self-service visualization and business intelligence. It can ingest, prepare, transform, and orchestrate data from multiple sources in real time to support advanced analytics, integrated dashboards, and actionable insights. It creates a single logical data repository of structured and unstructured data from all of enterprise on-prem and cloud data sources including Hadoop data lakes, EDWs and streaming data. It ensures end-to-end lineage and enables governed data sharing among peers, employees, partners, and customers. It leverages the scale and flexible nature of cloud to offer a low costs high performant data architecture. The Solix CDP is the data platform on which companies need to build their future business infrastructure.

Q. How does Solix Technologies ensure the scalability and compliance of the Solix CDP, particularly with regard to the increasing complexity of data regulations and privacy requirements? 

Key industry regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in healthcare, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) in finance, or the geo-specific privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States, and similar laws in other regions set strict standards for data privacy and security. These regulations mandate enterprises to implement robust data protection measures and ensure transparency in data processing.

As organizations move vast amounts of data between production and non-production environments for development, testing, and analysis, the protection of sensitive data in these non-production realms becomes paramount. While production data often benefit from robust security measures, non-production datasets can inadvertently remain exposed, often overlooked in terms of rigorous governance and security. This oversight can pave the way for potential breaches, risking not just regulatory non-compliance, but also reputational damage.

SOLIXCloud Data Masking (built on CDP) is the definitive answer to this challenge. Tailored to reinforce the security of sensitive data within non-production environments, Solix offers an unparalleled fusion of sophisticated data discovery and robust masking techniques, ensuring that sensitive information remains shielded from both internal and external vulnerabilities - and that compliance to these strong sets of privacy regulations is met.

Q. Solix Technologies leverages open-source platforms like Llama 3 and MLFlow for its AI solutions. How does this approach benefit your clients, and what are the advantages of using these technologies?

By leveraging Llama 3’s advanced language model capabilities, developers can create more sophisticated and context-aware AI applications, resulting in more natural and intelligent user interactions. This leads to improved customer experiences across various domains, from chatbots to content generation tools. MLflow’s incorporation allows for better management and tracking of machine learning experiments, enabling faster iteration and more robust AI models. This translates to end users receiving AI-powered products that are not only more accurate and reliable but also continuously improving. The open nature of these tools fosters transparency and community-driven enhancements, potentially leading to faster innovation cycles and more diverse AI applications.

Q. What are some notable success stories or case studies where Solix CDP has significantly impacted an organization’s data management strategy or operational performance?

We recently did a webinar where we showcased CDP’s use in a major international company. They had many years of successful growth, and had made several corporate acquisitions - all of which came with their own enterprise software stack. They saw data archiving and application retirement to be a key strategy for optimized enterprise data management. They saw archiving as a key factor for these themes and objectives: Operational Efficiency, Cost Management, Support for Litigation, Data Lifecycle Management, Regulatory Compliance, Data Security and Integrity. They have archived over twenty legacy applications with Solix CDP, and have over seventy more on their roadmap. This has significantly reduced their operational and maintenance costs for these now retired, redundant applications. But, the data is still available for compliance and audit purposes.

Q. With data security being a critical concern for enterprises, how does Solix CDP address these challenges? Can you elaborate on the specific security features and compliance measures in place?

The “privacy by design” suite of solutions includes end-to-end encryption, metadata management, data profiling, log data collection, data governance rules, sensitive data discovery, data masking and data compliance to ensure all personally identifiable information (PII) is properly identified, classified, masked and able to meet regulatory requirements. Solix CDP provides data officers with a single pane of glass view into the complete enterprise data landscape (both production & non-production). Data officers can quickly discover and report on - industry standard sensitive information such as PII, PCI, PHI using out of the box algorithms and confidential information that is unique to their organization using custom algorithms. The Solix CDP’s ability to scan through structured and unstructured data addresses the key issues of sensitive data discovery for today’s modern organizations. The discovery functionality can be extended with the Solix Data Masking capability to secure the sensitive data.

Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

We are now releasing SOLIXCloud Enterprise Data Lake, an innovative 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, in addition to the best of breed cloud data management with secure governance SOLIXCloud customers have relied upon for years. Along with robust governance for safety, security, compliance, and the lifecycle of data, the SOLIXCloud Enterprise Data Lake is a multi-cloud solution supporting AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Google Cloud, and hybrid on-premise deployment.

Running on the cloud-native Solix Common Data Platform (CDP), SOLIXCloud EAI is a third generation, transactional, streaming data lakehouse that brings core data warehouse and database functionality. Designed for high-performance, real-time cloud database workloads, the SOLIXCloud CDP supports ingest of streaming data, data pipelining and delivers transactional guarantees to the data lake with consistent atomic writes and concurrency controls tailored for longer-running data lake transactions. To ensure data infrastructures are not tied to any one vendor, the SOLIXCloud CDP supports Apache Hudi at customer early access, and Open Table Formats for Apache Iceberg and Delta are planned to follow.

Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

The world is embracing the possibilities of AI, and Solix is no different. SOLIXCloud Enterprise AI (EAI) will be a unified data platform and end-to-end data fabric for safe and secure data warehouse, analytics, machine learning, data science and generative AI model serving applications. SOLIXCloud EAI is built on a third-generation data intelligence platform with powerful streaming, data governance and transactional capabilities to safely and securely build, deploy and govern enterprise AI applications. With Solix Enterprise AI, organizations will collect, manage, process, govern and serve enterprise data for business intelligence, data warehouse, machine learning, data science and generative AI applications.

Meet the leader behind the success of Solix Technologies, Inc.

As the Founder & CEO of Solix Technologies, Sai Gundavelli is responsible for the company’s overall vision and strategic direction. Under his leadership the company pioneered the concept of Enterprise Data Management, for optimized storage, compute and AI.

He has a proven track record in recognizing and quickly responding to the requirements of the high-technology marketplace and is the founder of many successful companies including Emagia Corporation and TouchALife Foundation Inc.

Prior to founding Solix technologies, Mr. Gundavelli spearheaded several strategic initiatives in Enterprise Application areas at technology leaders like CISCO Systems.

Mr. Gundavelli is an Advisory Board member at University of Colorado, Denver and at SPARK AI initiative at UC San Diego. He is a business and technology thought leader and a distinguished speaker in many forums. He holds a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from University of Oklahoma and Bachelors from Osmania University.

“By leveraging Llama 3’s advanced language model capabilities, developers can create more sophisticated and context-aware AI applications, resulting in more natural and intelligent user interactions.”