70%
FASTER MIGRATION TIME
99%
OF MAPPINGS CONVERTED AUTOMATICALLY
40%
COST SAVINGS IN THE CLOUD
BMC works with 86% of the Forbes Global 50 and customers and partners around the world to create their future. With our history of innovation, industry-leading automation, operations, and service management solutions, combined with unmatched flexibility, we help organizations free up time and space to become an Autonomous Digital Enterprise that conquers the opportunities ahead.
“Modernizing from PowerCenter to IDMC allows us to continue working with Informatica products that we love—even reusing the business logic and mappings that we have developed over the years.”
Pioneering an efficient cloud data warehouse modernization
A leader in automation, operations, and service management solutions, BMC powers some of the biggest companies in the world, including 86% of the Forbes Global 50. Its cloud-based SaaS solutions and services help organizations embrace digital transformation to become more agile and efficient with real-time intelligence and orchestration.
“Over the years, we have amassed terabytes of data, which is at the core of everything we do,” says Jeff Gheen, Senior Director of Business Analytics at BMC. “And the crown jewel is our data warehouse, which helps us support our customers’ growing data demands and drives insights that will make them future-ready.”
When BMC began to outgrow its existing IBM Netezza data warehouse, the company seized the opportunity to modernize its own data platform by moving to the cloud. By switching to a Snowflake data warehouse, BMC could harness the scalability of the cloud to ingest more data and meet growing data demands.
But first, BMC needed to rethink its data integration strategy. Developers would need to rewrite code from scratch—a project that could potentially take years. As a longtime Informatica customer, BMC relied on Informatica PowerCenter for data integration and management. Migrating to Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) would allow BMC to complete its cloud journey using the Informatica solutions that it trusts.
After reaching out to Informatica for advice, Informatica invited BMC to become the first customer to participate in the Migration Factory approach. Informatica’s Migration Factory is a combination of automation tools, processes, and Informatica expertise that analyzes PowerCenter repositories to identify mappings, sessions, and workflows to deliver automated, cost efficient, and risk-free conversion of PowerCenter mappings to IDMC.
“The data warehouse is the backbone of our entire analytics ecosystem. We started asking ourselves if there was another way to get data integration into the cloud as efficiently as possible with minimal risk,” says Gheen. “Informatica offered another solution: become customer zero for the Migration Factory to make the move from PowerCenter to IDMC quickly and painlessly.”
“Informatica offered another solution: become customer zero for the Migration Factory to make the move from PowerCenter to IDMC quickly and painlessly.”
Modernizing to the Cloud in 6 months at nearly half the cost
Informatica supported migration at every step of the way to help BMC maximize the value of its cloud environment, from assessment and planning to testing, automation, and orchestration. “Modernizing from PowerCenter to IDMC allows us to continue working with Informatica products that we love—even reusing the business logic and mappings that we have developed over the years—and allows us to accelerate our migration initiative, all while taking advantage of all of the flexibility and agility that the cloud offers,” says Gheen.
The migration was no small task, starting with the transfer of 4,000 database tables and associated data. After the initial data migration, Informatica then focused on data pipelines, converting 217 workflows and 5,174 mappings. BMC further accelerated migration using its own data ops capabilities and tools for data validation.
“The devil is in the details, so extensive testing was incredibly important,” says Gheen. “Working with the Migration Factory gave us full access to Informatica’s expertise, insights, testing, and tools to help us feel much greater confidence in the migration. I would recommend anyone going through a PowerCenter to IDMC migration to work with Informatica Professional Services.”
In the end, the Migration Factory successfully migrated 99% of PowerCenter mappings, leaving only 1% to be rewritten manually. By reusing the majority of its mappings, BMC reduced the expected conversion timeline by 70%, while also achieving 70% cost savings for code migration. BMC further optimized the cloud experience by using its own tools to orchestrate the data ingestion process, which has resulted in the Snowflake environment running at nearly half the maintenance cost compared to the on-premises environment.
“It would have taken about two years to rewrite all of our code, but with the Migration Factory, we migrated over to the cloud in just six months,” says Gheen. “Our partnership with Informatica was key to this accomplishment and by modernizing our environment, we can bring even greater value to our own cloud services.”
Creating opportunities for innovation in the cloud
IDMC solves the question of how to manage huge amount of data across multiple location. BMC automatically pulls data from various locations, including cloud and on-premises environments, into IDMC. Business intelligence tools, machine learning algorithms, and BMC applications can then ingest and consume the data from this single platform.
With IDMC, BMC can take advantage of the scalability of the cloud to boost capacity and quickly onboard any data integration and data management use case as their data management needs evolve to intake and manage large quantities of data.
The Informatica Processing Units (IPU) pricing model provides a predictable price structure so that BMC only pays for what it consumes. Using this consumption-based pricing model, BMC can predict how scale will impact the budget. IPUs also drive down total cost of ownership by enabling a wide range of connectors and cloud services that foster further innovation.
“The IPU model means that we pay for what we use, which allows us to scale or add any cloud service at any time,” says Gheen. “When we decided to add the Oracle Cloud HCM application to our environment, we didn’t need to talk with procurement or come up with a budget. We just set up the connector in IDMC and started working with it immediately. It was that easy.”
Increasing cloud data availability for anytime access
Having found success with IDMC and Snowflake for data integration, BMC is ready to take advantage of the cloud across its data platform. BMC plans to dive deeper into its data fabric to make data more available to more users with data catalog and data governance powered by IDMC. The company also wants to migrate Informatica MDM from its current on-premises environment to the cloud, which will allow it to boost agility while taking advantage of the latest features and enhancements.
“It was clear that Informatica Professional Services was as deeply invested in our success as we were,” says Gheen. “We had daily scrums to work through sprints, identify issues, and fix them right away. It was a fantastic experience, which is why we’re so excited to keep working with Informatica on our continued transition to the cloud.”
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