How customers benefit from the combined effort between Tieto and migration-center

Author
Lauri Erkkilä
Solution Consultant @ Tieto

August 22, 2019

Thanks to fme’s migration-center technology, Tieto, a leading IT services company in the Nordics, helped its key strategic customer migrate 8 terabytes worth of business-critical information, ultimately saving costs, ensuring uninterrupted business continuity and unlocking the true value of the customer’s data.

Background

One of Tieto’s key strategic forest industry customers embarked on an initiative to optimize IT costs in the long run. One of the optimization targets was the way the customer handled application management.

The customer chose Tieto to take over the application management of over 70 applications – including their existing archiving practices. Furthermore, the customer was looking for a replacement for their cost-hungry in-house archiving solution – meaning that the customer’s archiving solution was to be transferred and migrated to Tieto’s pay-as-you-go based archiving service.

Challenge

It was clear that there is a need to take the step into digital transformation by providing a single, unified, enterprise-wide archive where all information is easily accessible for all employees. In this case, the customer selected Tieto’s Archiving as a Service as its target platform technology – a next-generation, cloud enterprise archiving platform that accelerates IT transformation by securing and leveraging critical application data.

The preconditions were clearly communicated: an active archiving solution containing 8 terabytes worth of documents – 70 million to be exact – was to be transferred and migrated. These documents were attached to day-to-day business processes, like invoice approval workflows, meaning there were no excuses for downtime, or else business would halt. All of this had to be done in a very strict timeframe.

Selecting a cutting-edge target platform technology is simple – the challenge lies in determining how to conduct the migration process in order to achieve maximum efficiency with the least downtime. During the evaluation phase in order to determine the most efficient way of migration, the first challenge proved to be the source systems itself: their built-in export functionality was limited at best.

fme to the rescue

There were a multitude of approaches laid on the table to get around this problem.

“We could, of course, build our own software. However, that was deemed as too expensive for a one-time migration. The second way was to use the platform’s framework, but that required heavier configuration than was allowed by the set efficiency and time requirements,” says Lauri Erkkilä from Tieto.

The third option was to utilize a partner who specializes in content migration. After a careful and thorough evaluation of possible approaches, Tieto found that fme’s migration-center was the missing piece of the puzzle of achieving the migration efficiency and time requirements set forth by the customer.

The solution

“In theory, the solution scales infinitely – only bottlenecked by hardware and network limitations.”

The decision was straightforward: fme migration-center was chosen solely to standardize the whole migration process, from beginning to the end. However, the beauty of migration-center was not only that the migration process works pretty much entirely with migration-center, but also in its ability to read source systems. For example, SAP migrations did not need any separate module or framework, eliminating downtime due to lack of extra processes running on SAP side even when migrations were on.

In addition, Tieto built a plugin for migration-center that helps in scanning source systems for content to be migrated and can be easily applied to any source system with little customization. The framework offered by fme made configuring the plugin a breeze.

“Thanks to the scanners, in theory, the solution scales infinitely just by deploying more and more scanners – only bottlenecked by hardware and network limitations,” says Lauri Erkkilä from Tieto.

Another strength of fme migration-center lies in its ability to work in conjunction with Archiving as a Service technology due to ready-made importer plugins: when archival packages – SIPs (Submission Information Packages) – are created for ingestion, they can be easily validated and enriched with migration-center, from simple metadata changes of strings and dates to more complex enrichments.

Saved time, reduced costs and increased customer satisfaction

Without migration-center, the project would have most likely taken around 12 months, if not more.

“Another potential partner projected 12 months from project start to finish – with fme, we halved that,” says Lauri Erkkilä from Tieto. “Thanks to its ability to work as a scalable, reusable migration orchestrator, integration layer and data validator, migration-center truly helps Tieto to offer migration services as a standardized package – and it is directly reflected in continued customer satisfaction.”

About Tieto

Tieto is a leading Nordic software and services company with a drive to grasp the opportunities of the data-driven world. Tieto’s customers are mainly large organizations that offer services to businesses, consumers and citizens in the Nordics and beyond, ensuring that their everyday business and services run smoothly, helping them create success through smart technology adoption and data utilization. With a turnover of approximately 1.5 billion €, Tieto has around 15,000 experts in close to 20 countries and its shares are listed in Nasdaq Helsinki and Nasdaq Stockholm.

In 2018, Tieto was nominated as a Global 100 Tech Leader by Thomson Reuters as a result of solid, long-term commitment to drive innovation, performance and social responsibility.

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