British retailer adopts Attunity Federate to reduce costs, enable retail-time business intelligence

Burlington, Mass. Attunity Ltd., a leading provider of real-time data integration and event capture software, announced that its data federation software, Attunity Federate, has been adopted by U.K.-based fashion retailer, Peacocks, for a strategic data migration project and to enable real-time business intelligence with reports for its 500+ stores.

Embarking on a strategic initiative to modernize its IT infrastructure, Peacocks set in place a migration project to replace its core legacy HP OpenVMS platform with one based on Microsoft server technologies, gradually moving the business data associated with its various applications including logistics, merchandising, finance, purchasing, and distribution operations. Planning for a multi-year and complex project, Peacocks looked for ways to accelerate the project, reduce its costs, and avoid disruption to business users while data was being migrated and moved.

“In planning to move our large RMS-based data sources to SQL Server, we realized that we would have limited support for handling change requests and deliver timely BI and reports required by our users, said Mark Webbley, solutions architect and project manager at Peacocks. “We did not want the migration project to hinder productivity and affect the business, and needed a way to shield our users from the changes being done to underlying data sources. We looked at data federation as a strategy and Attunity Federate provides us an easy and fast way to accomplish that.”

With Attunity Federate in place, Peacocks could access data in either RMS or SQL Server, or both, and could quickly reconfigure where data comes from without impacting their reports and BI services. The result reduced the costs of supporting the migration project, enabled accelerating it, and most importantly -- enabled consistent access to the information business users need while data is being migrated.

Webbley concluded, “Before this project, we already had great success using Attunity Connect to provide seamless SQL access to our RMS data. Adding Attunity Federate was the logical next step when we considered the migration project as an abstracted layer to move the data without the need to affect the application. Still, I was amazed at how fast it was and how little effort was required to map the data from both sources.”