Background
When large organizations merge or divest, then new entity has business transformation thrust upon it. Our client, a power generation manufacturer, divested from a larger organization to become a brand-new company. With the looming deadline of a cut-over from the existing data platform, the client engaged Starschema to validate and test the existing technology stack and determine the best way to move forward.
Challenge
The client had an existing, on-premises data platform for handling commercial data but was suffering from slow report loading, sometimes longer than 60 minutes, frustrating the primary data consumers, the sales and marketing teams. The performance issues drove some groups to turn to shadow IT solutions, building their own, parallel data platform. As part of the divestiture, the client wished to take the opportunity to look at migrating its data platform to the cloud. Part of the technology evaluation included the feasibility of migrating the stack components to the cloud.
Solution
Starschema data engineers completed a full design review of the existing technology stack which included Oracle ERP as the system of record, HVR for data replication, Greenplum as the database, Talend for ETL, and Tableau for data visualization. This design review included a detailed review of code and configuration for the various technologies used as well as reviewing data governance.Our experts designed a cloud-based architecture incorporating the existing technology on-premises components. After a lengthy testing phase and a Proof of Concept (PoC), the Starchema team optimized the components of the existing data platform to increase performance, validating the technology stack for post-divestiture operations.
Outcome
With a successful migration of the Oracle ERP source system to Oracle cloud and the other data platform components to an AWS environment, the client has benefited from reduced hardware, license, and maintenance costs. The new, cloud-based data platform renders reports several times faster than the on-premises version.