Modernizing Retail Data Infrastructure for Scale, Speed, and AI Readiness
Solvenna partnered with a fast-growing enterprise client to modernize and scale their data infrastructure by migrating legacy Informatica workflows and Amazon Redshift workloads into a Snowflake and Apache Airflow driven architecture. The engagement supported both analytical and customer data platform (CDP) use cases, enabling reliable, bidirectional data flows into and out of the CDP to power downstream activation, personalization, and analytics. The solution improved reliability, performance, observability, and long-term scalability while minimizing disruption to business-critical reporting, customer engagement workflows, and integrated systems.
THE CHALLENGE
The client operated a cloud-based data environment built around Informatica, Amazon Redshift, SQL Server, and AWS Glue; however, the architecture was highly fragmented, with data distributed across multiple systems and environments. As usage and data volumes increased, the platform became difficult to operate reliably and required significant manual effort to maintain.
Key challenges included:
- Data spread across multiple systems with limited centralized governance or visibility
- Frequent job and task flow failures requiring manual scheduling and intervention to rerun pipelines
- Limited logging and observability, making debugging and root-cause analysis time-consuming
- Alerting constrained to email notifications, providing little context and slow response to failures
- Performance bottlenecks and long-running workloads in Amazon Redshift, impacting analytics and time-sensitive CDP feeds
- Difficulty performing historical backfills, reprocessing, and replaying customer events
- Rigid Informatica workflows that were hard to version, extend, or automate as requirements evolved
- Limited flexibility to enable identity resolution, profile unification, and evolving marketing activation requirements
The client required a modern, cloud-native data platform with centralized orchestration, improved observability, and scalable processing to reliably support bidirectional CDP data flows, simplify backloading and reprocessing, and reduce operational overhead as the business continued to grow.
THE SOLUTION
Solvenna modernized the client’s data platform to support scalable analytics, CDP ingestion, and activation through the following capabilities:
Modern Data Platform Migration:
Migrated legacy Informatica workflows and Amazon Redshift workloads to Snowflake, with Apache Airflow providing centralized orchestration to improve scalability, performance, and reliability.
Automated Data Orchestration:
Replaced manual scheduling and Informatica task flows with modular Airflow DAGs, enabling automated dependencies, retries, backfills, and controlled reprocessing.
CDP Ingestion & Identity Resolution:
Standardized customer identifiers and ingestion pipelines to support profile unification, improved data quality, and consistent customer views across upstream and downstream systems.
Bi-Directional Activation Feeds:
Implemented reliable outbound data flows from Snowflake to CDP and marketing platforms to support segmentation, personalization, and downstream activation.
Operational Visibility & Reliability:
Introduced centralized logging, monitoring, and alerting to improve pipeline observability and significantly reduce time to detection and resolution of failures with PagerDuty.
THE RESULTS & BUSINESS OUTCOMES
A High-Performance Data Platform Built for Scale
Engineered a Unified, Cloud Native Data Architecture
Solvenna replaced legacy Informatica and Amazon Redshift workflows with Airflow orchestrated Snowflake native pipelines designed for incremental processing, high volume ingestion, and bidirectional CDP data movement. The modernized platform delivers faster and more reliable access to analytics ready datasets, significantly improving query performance, data freshness, and reporting consistency across teams. Orders load quickly enabling more customers to be included in trigger-based campaigns. Business and analytics stakeholders now have trusted, timely insights to support decision making, while engineering teams benefit from improved observability, automated backfills, and a scalable foundation that accelerates development without sacrificing data quality or system stability.
Business Impact & Future Value
- Reduced Operational Overhead and Cost Efficiency
- Improved Reliability and Data Freshness
- Streamlined, Scalable Architecture
- Faster Time to Insight and Activation
- Increased Efficiency Improves Customer Experience
- Foundation for AI and Advanced Analytics
Looking Ahead
With the core migration complete, the client is positioned to:
- Expand Airflow automation to additional domains and workflows
- Introduce advanced data quality and validation frameworks
- Enable near real time analytics use cases
- Further optimize Snowflake cost and performance
- Support new marketing, analytics, and operational initiatives with confidence
Summary
This engagement highlights Solvenna’s ability to successfully modernize complex data ecosystems by combining deep technical expertise with a pragmatic, low risk migration strategy. The result is a future proof data platform built for scale, reliability, and long-term business impact.
WE CAN HELP
Is your organization struggling to connect with your customers in a way they expect? Let Solvenna help you unlock actionable insights and power your growth through data-driven strategies.Contact us today to start the conversation!