Situation
After the acquisition of a classifieds group in 2021, the acquiring organisation had to take over systems that used to be delivered by the former holding company. One of those systems was the on-premise Global Data Warehouse, which enabled both global and local analytics functions and offered standardised global metrics, reports and dashboards across legacy markets. The goal of the consultancy was to support the organisation to detach this on-premise Data Warehouse and move it to AWS in combination with Databricks.
The consultancy specifically partnered on project management skills and the technical skills to set up the architecture of Databricks as part of the target platform and market enablement support, in which change management and training were included to realise sustainable results.
Approach
The project team, consisting of 60 employees distributed across several workstreams, realised the migration in a year. During the mobilisation and discovery phase, a detailed analysis of the target strategy (including POCs), delivery approach, costs and timelines were delivered. During the delivery phase, the target platform was developed, tested and complied with the client’s data mesh principles, including decentralised data access management. In addition, the market enablement team was responsible for training and guiding end-users towards the adoption of the new data warehouse.
Results
240 analysts from local markets and domain teams were onboarded on the new platform and 3PB of data, 410 dashboards, 205 ETL containers and 600 scripts (to Databricks) were migrated. In addition, end-users reported they experienced excellent support and clear communication, which provided the right guidance for the data warehouse migration. By completing the migration within this short period of time, the new environment immediately enabled the creation of new data products by users (SQL, Python, ML) and real-time collaboration.
