Data migration, once damned and doomed, evolves

Andrews joined Celona four months ago, after leaving Sun to spend "a very good 18 months with IBM. But the opportunity was just too tempting to turn down," he says. He sees a software that can lower both the risk and
timescales that traditionally attached to data migration activities, and has a passion to see IT migration become an enabling development for business, rather than one redolent of disaster.

He joined a privately held company of over 50 people, founded in 1997.  A quick look at the executive finds IBM, BT, SAP, Tandem, Cable & Wireless, Convergys, Siebel, Oracle, Nortel, Panasonic, Symbian experience in the team's background.

 "Around 20 people work on the R&D team," says Andrews. "The rest are in sales and service."  Headquartered in London, Celona already has offices in mainland Europe and Australia.  It started life as a consultancy company, and a lot of its early work was round the billing systems in the telecommunications market,  where it quickly  came to realise  that often  reusable pieces of a process or technology could be successfully taken from one project to another. That developed into the application software Celona Evolve. It now has two customers live, and is working and talking to another 34 within various stages of migration.

 BT was one of Celona's earliest users.  It  has been sufficiently  happy with its experience to still use Celona Evolve in its FeatureNet service.  Read the customer page on the website:

"We have selected Celona and Convergys Geneva to enable the transformation of the OSS and Billing architecture  for BT Retail FeatureNet services. This will result in substantially lower running costs and open up opportunities to extend the range of services we can offer to our customers through a common Service Management and Billing platform.

The inherent flexibility and resilience built into Celona will make the complex task of transforming and transferring vast amounts of customer data from legacy to strategic solutions a low-risk and responsive process.
Celona played a central role both during migration and in the final strategic architecture.

I believe Celona fulfills a key function, allowing us to drive the interaction between systems handling commercial  customer-facing matters and those managing network elements. It models the customer view of service inventory,  and passes only relevant service details on to other OSS/BSS layers allowing those other functions to remain clearly focused." says Richard Saffery, Billing development manager at BT Retail.

 "Celona understands complex requirements and fields the right people. They deliver solutions that work, on time and to budget." adds John Simmons, director of IT Strategy & Solutions Information Technology, Telewest Broadband (now Virgin Media).

"Historically Celona was working with number of clients over data migration of billing systems," explains Andrews.  "The biggest challenge was that there weren't the right tools in the market then to solve problems in the right way.
Celona Evolve now does this because it puts the business in control of the data. Business decisions can be made independently of IT. That's why it was such an exciting place to come to.  Celona Evolve can get IT to be an enabler,
and not an inhibitor. It's very flexible about how to consolidate. We are able to synchronise between multiple systems, either by moving the old into the new or by allowing the systems to talk, without actually migrating, but simply by linking both systems together."

Perhaps the most interesting option of the Data Migration table on Celona's website is the first one. "Don't migrate" with its promise of an immediate start and no baggage from the old world!  The fact that this is such an attractive solution, makes it relaxing to consider the remaining five routes.



"What we focus on is the application and the business logic, not on the data level, although of course we do move it," says Andrews."It's the complexity of the systems involved around such applications as Customer Relations Management platforms like Oracle Siebel, and the complexities around specific customers and their services."

He reverts to research for an example.  "One bank started to measure the complexity of its IT systems, very simply based on the different size of envelopes it sends out.  This showed that over 100 different envelopes were used for various customer categories that came out of the CRM systems, representing a 'nightmare of complexity' but understandably easily built up for an  organisation  that handles a variety of clients and services, such as credit cards, insurance, statements and so on.

"This complex relationship is built around specific customers and embedded into the technology.  Once configured, Celona Evolve can move on the 80:20 principal. It can reuse 80% of the data model, and by sitting above data to ensure it is moved  at the right time, and in the right order from the old to the new systems.

"Celona Evolve," he explains, "has recently built a business controller. This sees how the data is moving and assesses the quality of data.  It may be that the business does not want to move all the data.  It may not be cost effective. It comes down to what do you really need to move to  make the business work best. The data may be dirty.  It may be historic and not need to be moved forward. Celona Evolve helps a business make  these decisions. And the model is disarmingly flexible, so a company can change its mind, even half way through the migration!"

"What about competition?"

"Oh yes," he agrees,  " We do have a number of competitors in the ETL (extract, tranform and load) market, but none do the link of old and new
or two different systems. They simply take data from one system, put it into storage and carry it into a new or different system.   We work on an entirely different philosophy by linking  the  old and new or stitching  different systems together."

Celona Evolve software is built on industry standards in JAVA and Open Source using as much re-usable componentry as possible. It is quite comfortable with Oracle and a number of other database routes such as MySQL. The main categories of work to date are within billing, CRM and Network Inventory, and customers tend to have been big.

"Complex migrations involve a 100% bespoke migration script. None of that reusable. Its  not the way to drive economies or learn from experience,  and you don't capture inconsistency and constancy,"  Andrews says, admitting that  Celona Evolve  probably isn't a route for smaller companies.
 
"They don't have all that complexity of data that larger corporations have. The business problems we are targeting are larger enterprise, say a  local authority with 2,000 employees and a lot of departments. But that said, a small-sized financial service working with complex hedge fund data or a pharmaceutical company with a complexity of data research could find Celona Evolve a sound and economic solution."

What about scientific data? "Celona is primarily focused on the commercial sector, but we wouldn't have problem with R&D data," he says confidently, so there may be a project solution for scientific data, at present risking oblivion or unusability.

Celona Evolve has grown from Version 3.1 last year into V.3.2 complete with future development  roadmap. As the only built-for-purpose product,  it comes in three categories:  as an enterprise license, for a specific target package or as a specific project, with the prices "ranging from £100,000 through to £millions" as Andrews puts it.

But what price successful data migration?
"Priceless" as the credit card, Celona and its users would probably agree!


Web: http://www.celona.com
Scientific data risks: http://www.computescotland.com/451.php