In 2011, Eldorado Ltd — one of Russia’s largest consumer and household appliances retailers — faced two challenges: The company needed to develop business capabilities for real-time analytics, and it faced the task of migrating its speed-critical systems from Germany to Russia.

To solve these challenges, Eldorado worked with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., including using HPE’s HANA platform, which performs business processing and analytics in real time, as well as traditional database solutions. After the HANA implementation, sales report-processing time increased by 15 times the normal speed, stock replenishment reports were delivered nine times faster, and sales reports were created every hour instead of two hours.

“Retail business, it’s a business who needs very rapid decision making,” said Alexander Zhuk (pictured, right), SAP Basis lead at Eldorado. “At the time before migration, we had strong business requirements for our business growing and had some forecasts for how HANA will grow,” he said.

Zhuk and Randy Meyer (pictured, left), vice president and general manager of mission-critical systems at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the HPE Discover EU event in Madrid, Spain. They discussed how HPE and SAP HANA provided Eldorado the tools required for a successful systems migration. (* Disclosure below.)

Solutions for a successful data systems migration

The systems transition was especially tough for Eldorado, which has more than 600 shops around Russia in more than 200 cities. “From the application point of view, it was very painful, because we had to change everything. Some of our reports, they had to be completely changed, reviewed. We had to adopt some ABAP code for the new database. … Also we [had] some HANA-level troubles, because it was very elaborate,” he said.

Prior to using HP systems, the company had been running on IBM solutions. They switched from IBM to HP because of scalability issues and data residency rules in different countries. Eldorado felt HP understood these issues and rules better.

“For most customers we’ve talked to, it’s a journey,” Meyer said. “You’re moving from a tried-and-true environment that you’ve run for years, but you want the benefits in memory of speed, of massive data that you can use to change your business.”

Memory and speed capabilities were, in fact, the primary driving needs for Eldorado’s successful systems migration. Leading up to the migration, the Eldorado tech team analyzed the business requirements necessary for an effective customer relationship management system, including scaling it up to 900 terabytes in memory.

“It’s an exciting time. We’re watching this explosion of data happening. And I believe we’ve only just scratched the surface,” Meyer concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover EU event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the HPE Discover EU event. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE