Technology and Services
Software company reduces GCP migration cycle time by 10x with HCLTech’s SaaS Migration Factory
Today, technology companies are moving towards SaaSification for improved fault tolerance, cost savings, scability and agility. A leading software company had a mix of customers using on-premises and SaaS versions of their project portfolio management (PPM) solution, and needed a partner to quickly migrate more customers to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
The client is a global supplier of a wide range of hardware and enterprise software products that serve the datacenter, security, networking, software, broadband, wireless, storage and industrial markets.
USD Revenue
employees
years of innovation
The Challenge
Seamless migration of PPM from on-premises to SaaS
As a part of their modernization and open-source adoption drive, the client wanted to shift their PPM SaaS customers from the legacy, on-prem datacenter to the more advanced, and less expensive GCP. The PPM product is important for the client’s customers because it helps them expedite their digital transformation journeys, maximize their resources and make smarter decisions.
With more than 500 customers of the PPM product, the client wanted to ensure a smooth and seamless migration of their workloads while striving to achieve their application modernization goals.
While embarking on the migration journey, the client faced the following challenges:
- Co-located datacenters with multiple versions of the PPM product
- High number of VMs in production
- High licensing cost
- Insufficient application performance
- Security concerns
- Long turnaround for customer onboarding and upgradation
- Lack of self-service and self-healing capabiltiies
With the objective of end-to-end modernization and seamless migration, the client approached HCLTech to take complete responsibility of implementing and upgrading the PPM product. The client emphasized HCLTech’s product and industry knowledge to steer their open-source adoption journey.
The solution
End-to-end modernization and seamless migration
HCLTech recognized the immediate need for cloud migration to reduce costs and enhance performance, efficiency and security. The next step toward the goal was containerization and open-source adoption of GCP. For the best results, HCLTech innovated and built numerous solutions for a seamless migration of customers from Colo Oracle to PostgreSQL for GCP.
There were three things that HCLTech needed to do:
- Migrate the client’s customers’ workloads to GCP
- Handhold them in this journey and upgrade applications for seamless migration
- Implement PostgreSQL and move from the Oracle database
The migration process was by no means simple. Our experts strategized three phases for seamless and successful migration.
The phases included:
- Product Upgrade: The PPM product was upgraded as per need and containerized for deployment on the Oracle database
- Journey to PostgreSQL: After the containerized deployment of the upgraded PPM product, HCLTech migrated it from Oracle to PostgreSQL with the help of open-source tools such as Ora2Pg and a proprietary utility. HCLTech also performed refactoring and migration of Customer’s Jaspersoft reports and domains from Oracle to PostgreSQL. HCLTech was able to perform these migrations at scale by building automation scripts and processes that drastically reduced manual effort, cycle time and increased migration quality.
- Migration to GCP: Once the migration to PostgreSQL was complete, HCLTech migrated the entire workload from on-prem to GCP. HCLTech assisted in coordinating migration batches with customers, performed sanity testing and supported customer UAT and go-live process.
From PPM initially running with Oracle, the containerization was done on colocation. After the containerization of PPM with Oracle, HCLTech migrated from Oracle to PostgreSQL, and subsequently to GCP.
The outcome
Cost reduction, flexibility, improved agility and scaleability
The PPM product had to be modernized in order to be shifted seamlessly from a Colo Oracle to GCP environment. This activity involved the onboarding of customers on the new platform.
Subsequently, while every customer’s nuances were different, HCLTech created the SaaS Migration Factory model to make that onboarding onto a new platform a seamless process. This was done within a span of 6-8 months.
A typical on-prem to SaaS migration had taken between 4 weeks to 6 months per customer. After HCLTech deployed the Migration Factory, they were able to migrate all 300+ customers in 9 months.
Additional cost savings came with a move to an open-source component, PostgreSQL. At one point, the client was spending close to $13 million on an Oracle database just for the setup, but with the migration to PostgreSQL, that literally came to zero.
In summary, the outcomes achieved by the client included:
- 10x reduction in migration cycle time
- Faster upgradation and patch implementation
- Flexibility to move to another public cloud provider
- Cost reduction by moving from Oracle database to PostgreSQL
- Improved agility and scalability
- Improved SaaS offerings for migrated customers
In addition to outcomes for the client, the SaaS Migration Factory enabled HCLTech to reduce overall migration timelines and effort by nearly 10x, aided by automation.
