Vendors slow the data explosion with application data management

Want to shave a quick $125,000 off your IT budget? Try calling an application data management vendor. Industry analysts say these vendors sell software that improves on data management features offered by traditional data storage vendors such as IBM and EMC.

Boston-based AMR Research estimates that the LiveArchive data management package from OuterBay Technologies can save an organization roughly $125,000 per terabyte of data managed.

LiveArchive develops and executes policies for merging specific pieces of historical data with live production data so that users have instant access to whatever information they need at a given moment. OuterBay is likely to gain a higher profile in the manufacturing sector as a result of an agreement to work with NEC Solutions America to develop application data management solutions for PeopleSoft users. NEC Solutions is an IT consulting firm with specific practices around the PeopleSoft and SAP ERP suites.

OuterBay originally developed LiveArchive to work with the Oracle ERP suite and the Oracle database. The alliance with NEC Solutions sprang from NEC Solutions' efforts to help a sister division, NEC Electronics, solve its data management problem.

"We developed a front end to LiveArchive for the PeopleSoft suite, specifically for NEC Electronics," says Dennis Kilian, a NEC Solutions VP. Since then, NEC Solutions and OuterBay have teamed to get other manufacturers on the product, including Cleveland-based Kichler Lighting, the world's largest decorative lighting fixture & lamp company.

Kilian says LiveArchive decreases the average production database by 30 percent to 60 percent, which greatly reduces the need for data storage hardware. He says it also improves the performance of current applications by lessening network traffic, in addition to cutting the time it takes to upgrade applications by simplifying the data conversion process. "Sun Microsystems cut the time its system was down during an upgrade from four days to two days," he says, "which saved millions of dollars."