The Legacy Companies is a leading manufacturer and exporter of food service equipment serving over 130 countries through a network of distributors, dealers and retail channels, representing a diverse portfolio brands such as: Avanti, Bevles, Blakeslee, Chef’sChoice, Excalibur, General, Legion, Maxx Cold, Maxx Ice, Maxx Scientific, Nautilus, and more. The following is a transcript of an interview with Adrian Ostman, CTO, The Legacy Companies.
Key Takeaways
- Infor, like many legacy ERP systems, are limited in their interoperability and don’t have best-in-class embedded analytics.
- Many information system architects and analysts prefer BYOBI — they want data accessible to their favorite tools.
- Many dev and devops teams could write the custom code needed to extract, load and transform their data — but there no ROI in spending that time and money.
BYOBI — Power BI or Bust (Not Birst)
Mike Corbisiero (Precog)
What was the context of going to Google to search for an ELT solution for Infor?
Adrian Ostman
When you buy Infor CloudSuite, it comes with Birst — that’s Infor’s native BI/reporting solution. It’s a custom BI tool built for Infor, of course, and it takes some learning — and there aren’t many experts out there to hire. If Infor was my only source of data, I might use it; but our CFO came from a company where they were using Power BI exclusively, and he loves Power BI… so I went looking for a Power BI connecter. It turns out, Infor is just about the only application that doesn’t play well with Power BI.
Copy Everything ≠ Scalable Data Replication
Mike Corbisiero (Precog)
What was your initial solution for that? How did you get data ready for Power BI? How did you make it analytics-ready?
Adrian Ostman
We used DBeaver, actually. It kind of worked. We ran a massive daily replication job — copying over everything. Everything, each time. It’s not elegant, but it solved our problem in a basic way. It’s not scalable — there was no incremental loading, for example. But it was this pain, this lack of scalability, that drove us back to Google to find something better.
Incremental Loads — the Feature #1 for Enterprise ELT
Adrian Ostman
We knew someone had to have figured out the hard part — automated ETL, the source connectivity, the loading to data warehouses and databases. That’s Precog. And that it required no configuration was a bonus. Doing the incremental load logic would probably have taken weeks to do — and then maintaining it would have added a lot of overhead. Not a great use of our time when Precog has it already done.
Mike Corbisiero (Precog)
Is that the key feature of Precog that drives the most value?
Adrian Ostman
When we started using Precog, we were surprised that it only took a few minutes to get started — and the incremental loads! That was transformational. We never had that with our DBeaver-based solution — Precog brings that whole incremental load logic on day one — that’s a huge lift that we don’t have to worry about. You don’t need a beefy server, either. Low infrastructure, low compute, no-code…. once we set up Precog we did away with our old ways and never looked back. I recall the day we onboarded — it was a 90-minute call and we went from nothing to being able to ad hoc queries by the end of the meeting. That’s a huge advantage.
Replica Sets = the Foundation for Bulletproof Analytics
Mike Corbisiero (Precog)
What benefits does having automated data replication offer?
Adrian Ostman
When you’re running large, ad hoc queries, you don’t want them running on production data. We don’t want that, and the architects at Infor don’t want that either. They could have made ad hoc querying easy — and added the ability to save a query and send it as a report… but they don’t they don’t permit that for many obvious reasons mostly related to performance and stability. So the best you can do is to try to bring data over as needed so that you’re querying an analytics database and that helps keep your, your operational database free to run your application. Precog makes it radically simple to hit this balance.
