Customer Success Story
Embracing the Cloud to Democratize Data and Analytics
From strategy to execution and rollout, InfoCepts led a successful cloud transformation and modernization journey for a global luxury travel retailer.
InfoCepts successfully accelerated cloud migration and modernization of data and analytics platform for a global luxury retailer, reducing operating costs by 30%, improving system performance by 20%, and expanding its user base by 35%.
The Challenge
A leadership change and push for a data–driven culture fueled the need for innovative analytics solutions and self-service capabilities. But the on–premise, Netezza–based platform was proving to be greatly inadequate and expensive to operate in meeting the growing data and analytics needs of our client.
Pressure to modernize the data and analytics landscape was high. The company had a large number of business users to onboard and new capabilities to deliver, all while seeking to cut operation costs.
Replatforming a highly complex ecosystem that includes thousands of data structures, hundreds of integration interfaces, and numerous reporting applications was a laborious task. Adding to the challenge were around–the–clock, mission–critical operations having a limited window for switching over.
The Solution
InfoCepts’ cloud transformation program used a three–phased approach – blueprint, migration, and modernization.
The blueprint phase focused on defining the overall cloud strategy; it included running three unique proof of concepts to identify best–fit choices for the cloud platform and technology. For the data platform, we compared Redshift, Snowflake, and IBM DB2 on Cloud. InfoCepts also proof–tested DevOps platforms such as Jenkins, Kubernetes, and Dockers, in addition to testing automation tools such as Tosca and UiPath. This phase also focused on identifying new capabilities to deliver business value and automation to improve system efficiencies.
The migration phase leveraged InfoCepts’ Quick to Cloud (Q2C) accelerator suite for automation. Q2C automated the 1) porting of tables, views and SQL databases; 2) rewiring of ETLs through technical metadata; and 3) migration of cubes, reports, and subscriptions. We implemented Tosca to automate post-migration validation of history data, incremental data, and reports. And we designed a test suite to support future incremental and steady-state regression testing.
The modernization phase focused on enabling new capabilities, such as business data cataloguing and self-service data science, for user adoption and self-service consumption. Additionally, our team implemented Octa–based, single sign-on along with Jenkins–based, one-click deployment capabilities to enhance the user experience, strengthen information security, and reduce manual efforts.
The migration involved moving over 1000+ data mart tables (many of them holding terabytes of data) and 10 years of history data to the cloud. We rewired over 25 source interfaces and over 500 workflows. We also moved over 2500 SQLs scripts, including a data audit framework.
On the analytics front, we migrated 600+ cubes, 23,000 reports, and 800+ subscriptions to the cloud. In addition, 1500+ users were migrated to the new platform.
The Customer
One of the world’s leading luxury travel retailers offers a curated selection of products in 28 countries. Its network consists of 700 brands with over 9,000 employees worldwide—all focused on creating inspiring retail experiences for its customers.
Industry
Retail
Business Functions
Enterprise Analytics & Data Science, Merchandising, Store Operations
Solutions
Cloud Migration
Technologies
MicroStrategy, Netezza, Data Stage, Snowflake, AWS, Amazon S3, Octa, Jenkins, Tosca
Solution Accelerators
Quick to Cloud (Q2C)
Geography
APAC
Year of Deployment
2020
By leveraging a newly-upgraded cloud platform, we now have the ability to make our analytics more accessible, more meaningful, and more timely for those who need it most. I’m happy with the level of collaboration and passion from the InfoCepts team. This is a big win for both of our organizations.”
The Result
The cloud transformation enabled immediate onboarding of over 500 new store-level business users and the rollout of important analytics capabilities (store associate productivity and space profitability).
Automation for load monitoring, data validations, backups, deployments, and upgrades reduced operational overhead by over 30%, with scope for further improvements in the near future.
Higher concurrency with the cloud platform helped save about four hours in daily data load cycle with over 20% improvement in query performance. This helped improve latency and enhance the user experience.
Additionally, the system enabled:
- Tighter security and improved traceability, with named user access for both business and technology teams, coupled with better handling of encryptions and secrets management.
- Significantly lower data management costs through an AWS S3-based data staging and data management layer.
- Improved governance through on-demand allocation of processing capability by various workload types and for disparate technology and business teams.
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