The Next Pathway ‘Shift’ – Legacy Data Warehouse Migration to the Cloud in Just a Few Clicks

October 27, 2020 Off By David

Next Pathway Inc. announced a self-service version of its industry-leading SHIFT Migration Suite. This new offering is the only cloud migration tool available for direct use to enterprise customers, enabling them to leverage SHIFT’s extensive automation capabilities.  Putting SHIFT directly in the hands of customers will ultimately make it faster, easier, and cheaper for enterprises to jumpstart cloud migration projects – including planning, code migration and cutover – with just a few clicks.

Companies often struggle with legacy-to-cloud migrations because they lack an understanding of data flows, data lineage, complex workload translation techniques, data migration, and cut-over procedures – these factors have a significant impact on project timelines and costs.   Migration projects regularly fall short in areas such as code translation and ETL migration because developers are frequently called upon to write code manually or use inferior automation tools that only migrate simple scripts.  This strains developer resources and IT budgets while introducing the possibility of quality issues and inherent risk through human error.  Often migration projects are time-critical, as companies are faced with end-of-life software license contracts or termination of legacy support contracts.  Delaying a cloud migration project can put mission-critical reporting workloads at risk.

The new self-service version of SHIFT simplifies the power of automating migrations from legacy data analytics solutions.  SHIFTautomatically migrates code from the most common legacy sources, including; Apache Hadoop, Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum, and SQL Server; and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools like Informatica and DataStage, to a variety of prominent cloud targets, including Snowflake, AWS Redshift, Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery, and Yellowbrick.

“Because legacy data solutions simply don’t meet the needs of the modern enterprise, streamlining cloud migrations is our key focus,” said Chetan Mathur, Chief Executive Officer at Next Pathway. “By automating and simplifying the migration process, we’re empowering Next Pathway customers to get the most out of their enterprise data — and our new self-service offering means that  SHIFT users can leverage modern cloud data platforms to achieve a faster ROI.”

“We are in the midst of a generational shift as organizations are rapidly moving their data to the cloud, said Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake SVP of Product. “Our partnership with Next Pathway is essential to helping our customers automate this migration from on-premise solutions to Snowflake’s Data Cloud.”

Helping Customers Become Independent

In just the last eight months, SHIFT has translated over 100 million lines of code while providing its clients with a minimum 35% savings in migration time and costs. Next Pathway’s patented  SHIFT technology automates the core steps of cloud migration, encompassing planning and scanning of legacy data sources, including ETL pipelines, as well as workload testing and optimization, code translation, and code scanning for inventorying code types within legacy applications.

A free registration process enables new and existing customers to use  SHIFT immediately, via an easy-to-use GUI that allows for uploading of legacy databases and ETL code for rapid analysis. Users can then specify their desired source and target platforms and subsequently trigger code translation. With just a few clicks, SHIFT self-service customers can translate their on-premises workloads by themselves, without consuming IT resources or engaging third-party consultants. Clients that sign up for the new self-service version of SHIFT will also receive a free SHIFT Analyzer report that catalogs legacy code and offers important insights to enable effective migration planning.

“Automating legacy code conversion is a critical piece of the puzzle for enterprises who are looking to migrate from legacy data warehouses to the cloud,” said Rob Enderle, President and Principal Analyst of the Enderle Group. “With its SHIFT self-service offering, Next Pathway is providing a solution that accelerates the migration process, giving organizations a faster route to realizing value from their data.”