Optim Insync10 Paul Griffin presentation

Editor's Notes

• #3: Our clients of all sizes and across all industries share common drivers of the investments they are making in the management of their business data. Reminder: “Data” = structured application data... As opposed to unstructured information, or “Content”, such as E-mail, audio/video, document, etc. -Without properly managing the data volume, companies will see the impact in the performance of their system. It will have a multiplying affect which will lead to impact on availability of business applications. Optim can help alleviate potential problems before it severely impacts the organization. -Risk to an organization is not only around data breach, but also retaining data that is no longer required could lead to undue risk. Companies must comply to regulations and policies, but lack of proper data protection can lead to penalties, including damaging company’s reputation. -Complexity and cost of managing data spans across initial design of the data structure throughout all phases until properly sunsetting, or disposing of the data. Without proper management companies will face increasing IT cost for infrastructure and support resources while under constant pressure to deliver more for less. Most all companies will need help in meeting their objectives outlined in these three categories.
• #4: Optim’s broad, heterogeneous enterprise data management solutions help companies solve a variety of business problems, including data growth, test data management, data privacy protection, application upgrades, migrations and retirements, and electronic discovery. We provide these capabilities across three major solution areas: --The Optim Data Growth Solution mitigates the adverse impact of rapid data growth by archiving historical data safely to a secure archive. The archive can be maintained as a database or as a compressed file, and can be stored on any hardware device. Companies have universal access to the archives, supporting retention compliance initiatives. Archiving seldom-used or historical data streamlines processing workloads, resulting in improved application performance and lower overall storage costs. Archiving prior to an application upgrade reduces the amount of data to be migrated, thereby reducing downtime and enabling timely project completion. Archiving allows companies to safely retire legacy or unsupported applications while preserving their underlying data records. --The Optim Test Data Management Solution enables companies to speed the deployment of new or upgraded applications, ultimately accelerating revenue generation. By extracting a precise subset of application data records, companies create targeted, right-sized test databases faster and more easily than by cloning entire production copies. With less data to process, iterative testing cycles are completed more quickly, while testers improve quality by identifying and fixing bugs in the earliest stages of development. --The Optim Data Privacy Solution offers contextual, application-aware, persistent masking techniques to protect confidential data. By substituting realistic but fictionalized data for private information, Optim creates a protected test database which QA staff can utilize to generate accurate test results while supporting compliance with privacy mandates such as HIPAA, GLBA, PCI and the EU Directive on Data Protection.
• #5: Optim is consistently named as the archiving market leader by the major analyst firms, with market share estimates ranging from 38% (IDC) to 46% (Gartner).  IDC estimates that the database archiving portion of “Worldwide Database Development and Management Tools market is approximately $100 million out of the reported $238 million total for this segment.  “This means that Optim’s $38 million, which is entirely in the database archiving and related tools subset of this segment, would represent roughly 38% of that subset." Quote is from Carl Olofson, August 31, 2007, concerning his Worldwide Database Development and Management Tools 2007-2011 Forecast and 2006 Vendor Shares, published July 2007.  
• #7: The phrase “four pillars of EDM” is used to describe the essential elements of an EDM solution, elements by which you should evaluate the fit of any potential solution or provider. We alluded to the concept of enterprise architecture on the prior slide. It is also imperative that an EDM solution manage data at the level of a “complete business object,” or referentially intact subset of data. I’ll describe this concept in more detail in just a moment. The solution must provide capabilities to extract or copy these business objects; to store them in any desired format or environment, to port them from one place to another, based on evolving business value, and to protect them from unauthorized activity. Finally, because the users will need to interact with their data records differently at different points in the lifecycle, the EDM solution must offer universal access methods that support the appropriate service levels for access.
• #8: Why is it important to have a single, scalable solution that supports all the applications, databases and environments in your enterprise? Because every company – whether large or small – has a mixed or “heterogeneous” infrastructure that includes some combination of mission critical applications, running on a variety of databases and operating systems. And these systems interoperate with one another to form your key business processes – like booking a sales order, shipping a product or posting a payment. By leveraging a single, scalable and interoperable EDM solution, you have a central repository to define and store all the policies for managing, moving, copying, retaining and ultimately disposing of your application business records. You achieve the greatest level of consistency with the fewest resources at the lowest cost. You protect and leverage the your investment in enterprise applications and data assets.
• #9: What is a “complete business object?” Why is it important to capture a complete business object? Business objects represent the fundamental building blocks of your application data records. From a business perspective, for example, a business object could be a payment, invoice, paycheck or customer record. From a database perspective, a business object represents a group of related rows from related tables across one or more applications, together with its related “metadata” (information about the structure of the database and about the data itself). EDM solutions that capture and process the complete business record thus create a valid snapshot of your business activity at the time the transaction took place – an “historical reference snapshot.” So, when you archive a complete business object, you create a standalone repository of transaction history. If you are ever asked to provide proof of your business activity (for example, if you receive an audit or e-discovery request), your archive represents a “single version of the truth.” You can simply query the archive to locate information or generate reports. Some vendor solutions do not archive a complete business object. Rather, they separate the business object into two parts: the transaction line detail and the associated master and reference information. Then, they move the transaction line detail records to a separate database. But a database of transaction detail records does not represent a “single version of the truth” because the details are separated from their master information – they have no business context. In order to generate meaningful business reports, the user must re-associate the archived transaction details with their related parent rows from the original the production system. A lot of things can go wrong in this scenario. For example, the links between transaction detail and parent rows are sometimes broken. This means that you have created orphan rows in your database. Federated object support means the ability to capture a complete business object from multiple related applications, databases and platforms. For example, Optim can extract a "customer" record from Siebel, together with related detail on purchased items from a legacy DB2 inventory management system. Federated data capture ensures that your data management operations accurately reflect a complete, end-to-end business process. Only Optim provides federated object support.
• #14: What is a “complete business object?” Why is it important to capture a complete business object? Business objects represent the fundamental building blocks of your application data records. From a business perspective, for example, a business object could be a payment, invoice, paycheck or customer record. From a database perspective, a business object represents a group of related rows from related tables across one or more applications, together with its related “metadata” (information about the structure of the database and about the data itself). EDM solutions that capture and process the complete business record thus create a valid snapshot of your business activity at the time the transaction took place – an “historical reference snapshot.” So, when you archive a complete business object, you create a standalone repository of transaction history. If you are ever asked to provide proof of your business activity (for example, if you receive an audit or e-discovery request), your archive represents a “single version of the truth.” You can simply query the archive to locate information or generate reports. Some vendor solutions do not archive a complete business object. Rather, they separate the business object into two parts: the transaction line detail and the associated master and reference information. Then, they move the transaction line detail records to a separate database. But a database of transaction detail records does not represent a “single version of the truth” because the details are separated from their master information – they have no business context. In order to generate meaningful business reports, the user must re-associate the archived transaction details with their related parent rows from the original the production system. A lot of things can go wrong in this scenario. For example, the links between transaction detail and parent rows are sometimes broken. This means that you have created orphan rows in your database. Federated object support means the ability to capture a complete business object from multiple related applications, databases and platforms. For example, Optim can extract a "customer" record from Siebel, together with related detail on purchased items from a legacy DB2 inventory management system. Federated data capture ensures that your data management operations accurately reflect a complete, end-to-end business process. Only Optim provides federated object support.
• #15: With the complete business object as its fundamental building block, the EDM solution must then offer the capabilities to: --Extract, or copy, the data; --Store the data in any desired format, on any hardware device or storage tier; --Restore some or all of the data to a different environment, whether a replacement application, a reporting environment or even a data warehouse.
• #16: Optim offers federated data operations, meaning that it accurately captures, extracts and archives data from multiple related applications, databases and platforms. For example, Optim can extract a "customer" record from Siebel, together with related detail on purchased items from a legacy DB2 inventory management system and payment detail from Oracle Financials. Federated data capture ensures that your data management operations accurately reflect a complete, end-to-end business process, like “order to cash.”
• #17: On the left, you have one to two years worth of “current” financial data in your production database. Your monthly and quarterly period processing performs well, as do your yearly comparison reports. In the middle, you have another few years of financial data in an active archive database that provides full access to your data with mid-level performance. You can archive even older data to a flat-file format to take advantage of more cost-effective storage options, such as HP StorageWorks™, EMC Centera™ or NetApp NearStore® with SnapLock™. If you need access to data stored in one of these storage alternatives, you should be able to access the data directly and/or selectively restore some of the data to the active archive database. Finally, for the oldest data that you must retain for a decade or two or more, having the ability to store these flat files in an offline archive tape may help reduce costs even further. This diagram, of course, would be adjusted to meet your company’s unique storage requirements and strategies. Optim provides the ability to store archived data on the most cost-effective storage alternative, according to its business value and access requirements. Every company values data differently. Understand how your data is valued and spend as much, and only as much, as you need to provide data access.
• #18: After data has been relocated into an archive, it may be necessary to retrieve, restore or reload that data to a new environment. Optim provides the ability to restore data from any environment to any environment. You can restore some or all of the data – a single transaction record, a year’s worth of data, or any range or other parameter you specify. Optim’s “selective restore” capability provides the foundation to support application upgrades, migrations, instance consolidations or retirements. In this example shown here, an organization has retired its legacy HR information system by archiving the underlying transaction records. They can interact with the data in archives through universal access methods, including any ODBC/JDBC compliant application, report writer or desktop tool. If they need to bring back a record, perhaps because a former employee has rejoined the organization, they can easily locate and reload that record to the replacement application, in this case PeopleSoft HCM.
• #19: A key consideration in implementing an archiving strategy is how you will interact with the data in the archive. Optim’s universal access methods provide the flexibility you require to interact with archived data, even as your needs change over time. Optim’s universal access enables the use of standard methods such as ODBC/JDBC and XML, reporting tools like Cognos, Crystal Reports or even Microsoft Excel, as well well as the application itself. When first considering archiving, companies may focus on native application access methods. Users can leverage familiar pages or forms, and existing business processes, to examine archived data either on its own, or through a joined database view with production data (in most implementations; not true for the Optim Solution for Siebel). Native application access is generally most useful in the first two to three years of the archive lifecycle, when archived data is being used mainly for historical trend comparisons. Keep in mind however, two important limitations of native application access: a) the joint database view introduces additional processing overhead that could impair application performance; and b) you must maintain the originating application and version in order to use native access. Over time however, other archive use cases become more important. For example, five years down the road, you may need to produce an historical reference snapshot of your business activity in response to an audit or discovery request. Application independent access methods are critical in this case. Users can view, query and report on data in archives using industry standard methods (SQL, ODBC/JDBC, XML) and reporting tools (Crystal, Cognos, Business Objects, PS Query, SQR, Discoverer or others). Users can also browse the archive files directly using Optim's data browser, or even export archived information to a CSV file or Excel spreadsheet. Application independent access alternatives are critical because they allow the greatest support over the full archive lifecycle. You do not need to maintain the originating application or version, so your data is future-proof. You can have no limitations on application upgrades or retirements. And because of the rich content of the archive file, you can always restore the archive back to a database environment if you need to.
• #21: Here is how Optim works: This is a typical example of a Production environment prior to archiving. Both Active and Inactive data is stored in the Production environment, taking up most of the space on the Production Server. <Click> Optim safely moves the inactive or historical data to an archive, which can be stored in a variety of environments. <Click> Optim provides universal access to this data through multiple methods, including Report Writers such as Cognos and Crystal Reports, XML, ODBC/JDBC, application based access (Oracle, Siebel, etc.) or even MS Excel. <Click> Finally, data can be easily retrieved to an application environment when additional business processing is required. As you can see, Optim’s broad capabilities for enterprise data management help give CIOs a comprehensive solution for dealing with data growth.
• #22: Similarly, Optim facilitates the application upgrade process. By archiving historical transaction records prior to an upgrade, organizations can reduce the amount of data to be migrated at production cutover. The upgrade is completed on time, with minimal risk of business disruption and better performance of the upgraded system. If the organization so chooses, they can upgrade the historical data separately, after normal business operations have been successfully resumed.
• #23: Recall that Optim enables you to safely retire or decommission obsolete or redundant applications that no longer create sufficient business value. As we noted earlier, organizations can archive the underlying transaction records while retaining universal access to the data. If it ever becomes necessary to restore the records back to a processing environment, they can easily specify, locate and reload those records.
• #24: We begin with a production system or clone of production <Click> Optim extracts the desired data records, based on user specifications, and safely copies them to a compressed file <Click> IT loads the file into the target Development, Test or QA environment. <Click> After running tests, IT can compare the results against the baseline data to validate results and identify any errors. They can refresh the database simply by re-inserting the extract file, thereby ensuring consistency.
• #25: Optim provides a comprehensive set of data masking techniques to transform or de-identify data in non-production environments, such as test/development, QA and training environments. The method you use will depend on the type of data you are masking and the result you want to achieve. Optim’s data masking technology preserves the integrity of the data and produces consistent and accurate results that reflect the application logic. Masked data can be propagated accurately across multiple non-production environments to generate valid test results.