Initial situation

The sales team of one of Europe's largest electricity producers was using SAS 9.4 onPrem software for its mission-critical performance and customer insights. In order to make the infrastructure more cost-effective and efficient in the future, it was decided to migrate to the modern, cloud-based SAS Viya platform. The manufacturer SAS provided the necessary infrastructure for this in the customer's Azure environment.

HMS solution

HMS Analytical Software had the task of optimising this provided infrastructure and achieving an operational state. The aim was to achieve low-maintenance operation while at the same time meeting the platform's performance, integrity and availability requirements through active monitoring and management. This required extensive experience in SAS, SAS Viya and Azure technologies. The HMS team consisted of experts in infrastructure (AKS, Kubernetes, ArgoCD) as well as configuration and operation.

The migration process comprised the following steps:

• Concept creation: the departmental logic was mapped.
• Efficient migration: Thanks to experience with comparable projects and the use of our HMS migration tool, the migration from SAS Base 9.4 to SAS Viya was efficient. Automated text and rule replacement contributed to this.
• SAS Cloud Operations: HMS established the required SAS Cloud Operations towards the customer. Both sides agreed on a shared responsibility in order to gather experience for a comprehensive operating concept.

Benefits

Thanks to expert consulting, project and operational support, the electricity giant was able to successfully carry out a complex technological migration and set up a stable user environment. Since then, HMS has provided long-term support for the environment.

Implementation

Technologies: SAS, Kubernetes, Databricks, Azure DevOps, ArgoCD, GitOps, Python, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenSearch
Partners: SAS, Microsoft