Global eCommerce Platform Provider - Legacy Migration to Amazon Redshift

Large retail companies require Order Management Systems for tracking customer orders from creation to delivery. These systems are quite complex as they involve order tracking, stock level maintenance, packaging and shipping, and even synchronizing orders across multiple channels (e.g. if a customer orders online and picks up the item in a store). The market for Order Management Systems (OMS) is expected to grow from 1.46 Billion in 2018 to 2.44 Billion by 2023, reflecting the rapid growth in retail and e-commerce. *

Retail Order Management requires multiple steps in a sequential process including Capture, Validation, Fraud Check, Payment Authorization, Sourcing, Backorder Management, Pick/Pack/Ship, and associated customer communications. Order management systems usually have workflow capabilities to match the process.

To take advantage of this growing market, the customer had developed a Retail Order Management system by integrating the best of breed technologies available at the time. They created their own commerce platform to provide an OMS Service, as well as implementing next generation AI for enhanced customer experience. This active acquisition/development cycle put tremendous pressure on the IT staff to migrate the disparate technology components into one consolidated platform.

In 2019, the customer announced the release of new Order Management technology that considerably improved the usability, scalability, and extensibility of the company’s Unified Commerce Cloud platform. The release also included features such as an updated User Interface (UI), unified product catalogue, inventory management, and a flexible fulfilment platform based on a Business Process Management (BPM) engine. The customer also updated its Mobile Point of Sale product to leverage the same capabilities of the Unified Commerce Platform.

The updated Order Management solution enabled B2C and B2B merchants to manage the entire customer journey by easily deploying omnichannel programs including in-store pick up, ship-from-store, and vendor drop ship.

The broader Unified Commerce Cloud developed by the customer featured native Order Management, ecommerce, and Mobile Point of Sale solutions. As new companies were acquired, they implemented AI-Powered Personalization to provide the customer’s clients with individualized experiences at every step of the omnichannel customer journey. The Unified Commerce Cloud solution could easily be deployed globally because it now leveraged Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s Cloud Platform.

As the customer started their migration to the AWS Cloud, they uncovered major issues, their legacy database has different workflows from Amazon Redshift. Many of their acquired firms had built their individual components on their legacy database. To achieve savings, latency and reduce complexity, all application components needed to work on AWS. To create a consolidated platform all triggers, custom code, and stored procedures needed to be migrated over to Redshift.

This table demonstrates the size of the project:

Only one company could provide a complete environment for the migration: AWS. AWS’s proven experience in retail and ecommerce demonstrated that AWS alone could provide the omnibus package necessary for rolling out a new consolidated retail platform.

Amazon itself completed a similar migration in October 2019. Amazon’s Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr, said:

“The migrations were accomplished with little or no downtime, and covered 100% of our proprietary systems. This includes complex purchasing, catalogue management, order fulfilment, accounting, and video streaming workloads. We kept careful track of the costs and the performance, and realized the following results:

• Cost Reduction - We reduced our database costs by over 60% on top of the heavily discounted rate we negotiated based on our scale. Customers regularly report cost savings of 90% by switching from legacy to AWS.
• Performance Improvements - Latency of our consumer-facing applications was reduced by 40%.
• Administrative Overhead - The switch to managed services reduced database admin overhead by 70%.” **

Migrating legacy applications and databases is not just a matter of moving the data from one database to the next, as the custom applications would need to be rewritten manually. This is where mLogica excels. mLogica provides automated tools and methodologies to covert the code in legacy applications to enable them to run on the new platform. Automation is the key to accurate, repeatable code translations, while the key to repeatable successful Migration Projects is by wrapping automation within Proven Migration Methodologies, which accelerates project timelines, lower migration costs, and lower business risk.

mLogica was the ideal choice due to:

• Expertise - mLogica has been successfully migrating databases to AWS since its inception. The real key is the last mile: stored procedures and customized code must be replicated in the AWS database environments. Attempted manually and internally, this complex process can lead to spiralling project timescales and costs. mLogica’s depth of knowledge and utilization of proprietary migration software mitigates these risks.
• Experience - With 16 years in the business, mLogica has developed an automated AI - software driven approach. Automation is key: you do not want your IT talent manually recoding databases on top of their existing workload. mLogica has vast experience in completing these tasks with little down time or code lock on application development, freeing your staff to work on projects bringing revenue to your business.
• Speed - Compared to a manual process, we can complete migrations in 1/3rd of the time, allowing customers to start benefiting from their new platform and seeing ROI far sooner.
• Savings - This goes hand in hand with the speed mLogica can achieve compared to manual or off-the-shelf automation migrations. As our highly specialized automated approach greatly reduces project timescales, our costs can be as much as 50% lower than competing firms or internal efforts.

Internal IT teams have enormous responsibilities. Manual database migrations, even if firms do have a qualified staff, often take far longer and cost much more than anticipated and budgeted for. It was simply not possible for our customer to pull high value personnel from existing responsibilities, particularly for a project of the size and complexity of a database migration.

Engaging mLogica to carry out this work allowed the customer to focus on innovation of their expanding platform at full capacity, while the automation and expertise of the mLogica team meant the project was completed in only two months with a cost savings of 45% compared to quoted price for a manual migration.

Almost every company is considering a migration from on-premise IT environments to the cloud with the question being not if, but when. If it was easy…these migrations would all be done!

The difficulty lies with migrating the legacy applications & databases. Stored procedures and customized code are the twin anchors keeping firms from moving to the cloud. mLogica’s expertise and experience can release you from these chains and allow your journey to the cloud to proceed at a fraction of the cost and timescale of a manual migration.