By Lenore Adam
Tell us about J2 Consulting and the unique services you provide for enterprise customers.
J2 Consulting specializes in database management, data security and compliance, and data delivery. Our team has significant experience working with large enterprise data teams– especially in financial services, banking, and logistics– to manage and optimize their data environments, accelerate software development, and ultimately drive business growth. We are also one of SAP’s specialist partners for its Database Migration Factory Program, helping SAP ASE and SAP IQ customers migrate to the new managed cloud service, SAP HANA Cloud.
How does J2 Consulting and Delphix help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation programs using data?
Many of our clients experience challenges caused by a lack of data infrastructure. Database teams face urgent requests for data provisioning, which invariably involves time consuming processing by administrators. Developers and testers need immediate access to production-quality data for testing but also must ensure that data achieves the highest level of security and compliance. With ever increasing demands for data across the organization, the volume of manual data operations is becoming unsupportable, incurring unnecessary cost, risk, and complexity.
Together with Delphix, we’re able to remove those bottlenecks and empower customers to fully exploit their data’s potential to drive growth and innovation. The Delphix team is extremely supportive and value our work together. We look forward to building upon our partnership as we help more organizations exploit data potential.
Tell us about one of your biggest success stories.
One of our joint customers struggled to meet deadlines of a major project due to an inability to deliver enhanced digital experiences for internal users. Implementing these changes required a deluge of test environments, and they couldn’t meet the demand. Developers were also constrained by a lack of quality data in test environments, which negatively impacted integration testing across systems. Use of old, stale data raised concerns about the viability and reliability of testing for their business-critical platform releases.
They integrated Delphix into their DevOps toolchain to provide a continuous supply of quality data for CI/CD workflows. We were able to apply our SAP Sybase expertise to deliver production-quality data from SAP ASE and IQ into Delphix. DevOps teams were able to leverage data-ready, ephemeral test environments with rapid spin up and spin down via API, and orchestrate the provisioning of multiple databases for integration testing.
The customer saw fantastic results. They were able to significantly boost developer productivity by reducing the time to provision data environments from 2 weeks to just 3 hours. The resulting reduction in project timelines, from two months to two days, meant they could react faster to market changes and user demands. They also reduced their development storage costs by almost 95%!
Lastly, could you share insights on any data management trends you expect to see in 2021?
The transformative potential of data is of course now universally accepted, yet the need for enterprise-wide data policies and frameworks to exploit this asset is still not always understood. I believe this is the year this will change. As data volumes continue to grow across complex, hybrid, and multi-cloud applications and platforms, data infrastructures will be seen as a necessity. Data fabrics that underpin and interconnect multi-cloud workloads and new methods for automating data management will become mainstream. Finally, the data role will become a core business function.