Zero downtime pioneers launch Celona Evolve 3 and signal a new phase in the market for application data migration

London, UK, 13th November 2008: Celona, the leaders in business-centric application data migration solutions, today announces the latest version of its business centric application data migration platform, Celona Evolve 3. Celona Evolve is purpose built to meet the data migration requirements of today’s changing business environments for business applications such as Network Inventory Management, CRM, Billing and ERP. Celona Evolve is proven to directly lower costs, risk and time-to-value, while minimising disruption for application data migrations.

Celona Evolve already provides a unique zero downtime application migration environment which enables an IT organisation to separate the migration of data, users, systems and processes and support changing business requirements during the migration.  In turn, this reduces complexity and minimises the impact of migration projects or programmes on the day-to-day running of business operations, as well as providing a platform for supporting strategic programmes such as business and IT transformation - a fact of life in today’s business world.

New features to Celona Evolve 3 which directly support 360-degree visibility and management of application data migration programmes include:

• Migration Management Centre – Powerful modelling, scheduling and reporting features define and manage the migration lifecycle including timing, business data sets, data dependencies and synchronisation, users and processes. This supports Celona’s Progressive Migration approach where different migration strategies can be chosen to suit business and IT requirements

• Track-and-Trace audit trail – Business level information is provided in real-time for management, control and compliance of the end-to-end migration process

• Concurrent Synchronisation Engine – Concurrently migrates and synchronises between source and target applications. This bi-directional feature provides a business approach that reduces risk, provides continued support for the legacy ‘ecosystem’ and enables testing prior to ‘go-live’. This ensures data integrity over prolonged migration periods

• Dynamic data transfer – Celona Evolve requires no off-line staging or storage, therefore ensuring data is always available to the operation throughout the migration in real-time

• Adaptive Migration Framework (AMF) – Celona Evolve’s unique framework enables the flexible plug-in of application adaptors when migrating data from a legacy source to a new application target or domain.  The Adaptive Migration Framework (AMF) contains a transformation model library, where data transformation models and rules of the mappings of legacy and target application systems are utilised in a common model. Using this agile transformation model allows data from source and target applications to be individually mapped and modified throughout the migration process.

“Traditional ETL and scripted methods were not designed to manage the complexity and nature of business applications in today’s business environments. Celona Evolve is designed to deliver faster business results and remove the headache that IT departments have when managing application data migration projects in a changing business environment. Through our customer deployments we can deliver migration results up to 75% faster than traditional data migration approaches,” said Matt Hooper, Chief Marketing Officer of Celona.

Philip Howard, Research Director at Bloor Research commented: “Celona’s Evolve platform goes beyond traditional approaches to data migration by working at the business application level. This makes the migration process considerably more robust and removes much of the risk that has been historically associated with migration efforts. Secondary benefits include business level control and visibility, support for zero-downtime migration, and a flexible environment that can adapt to changing priorities and circumstances.”