About the Customer
This leading grocery retailer has over 2,200 stores across the United States and generates nearly $80 billion in annual revenue by providing customers with a wide variety of groceries, pharmacy services, fuel, and other household essentials.
The Challenge
The retailer planned to migrate their Snowflake on Azure environment and modernize 300+ complex near real time ingestion pipelines. But they were facing several key challenges:
- High Costs: Given the complexity and volume of their data ingestion pipelines, operating Snowflake on Azure had significant costs.
- Complex and Aging Infrastructure: Maintaining pipelines built on IBM Integration Bus and Azure presented operational challenges and limited their ability to adapt to evolving business needs.
- Data Silos: Having data spread across different systems hindered the retailer’s ability to gain a holistic view of their business operations and customer behavior.
- Real-Time Access to Analytics: Their existing infrastructure didn’t support their growing demand for inventory management, pricing optimization, and personalized customer experiences.
The Solution
BigQuery as the Foundation: Onix migrated all data warehouses from Azure Snowflake to BigQuery, which offered a highly scalable and cost-effective data warehouse solution to handle the company’s massive data volume and complex analytical needs.
Dataflow for Streamlined Ingestion: Onix modernized the complex, legacy ingestion framework by building a simplified, singular, and streamlined solution using Dataflow. This allowed for efficient and scalable data ingestion from various sources.
Proprietary Tools for Accelerated Delivery: Onix leveraged our proprietary products for data discovery, transformation, and validation. These tools accelerated the migration process and ensured data quality throughout.
The Impact
Performance & Cost Efficiency
- Faster Insights: 40%+ faster runtime compared to their legacy system.
- Reduced Costs: Save over 30% over five years, including eliminating legacy licensing fees.
- Optimized Data Pipeline: Benefit from low latency and high data quality with a streamlined architecture.
Operational Excellence
- Unified Platform: Increased efficiency with a single platform for data and analytics.
- Simplified Management: Centralized data storage and standardize security, governance, and orchestration.
- Faster Delivery: Accelerate the turnaround time for new requests and changes.
Future-Proof Foundation
- Modernized Infrastructure: Centralized, scalable GCP solution.
- AI-Powered Insights: Leverage AI and Google integrations for advanced analytics.
- Data Democratization: Empower users across the organization with easy access to data.
Why GCP and Onix?
BigQuery offered a compelling data warehousing solution, providing scalability and cost-effectiveness to meet the retailer’s demanding needs. The migration also presented an opportunity for the grocery retailer to modernize their data infrastructure, consolidate systems onto a unified platform, and embrace cutting-edge, cloud-native technologies for enhanced efficiency and agility.
The customer chose Onix to spearhead their migration to GCP due to a combination of trust, expertise, and technology. Our prior successful collaborations, coupled with our status as a Google-preferred partner, instilled confidence in the customer. Onix also have a proven track record in cloud migration data engineering, and GCP, which assured the retail chain that Onix had the expertise to navigate the complexities of the project.
