Creating a modern data strategy
The client
A UK-based global retailer specialising in business-to-business sales of electronics, electrical components, and engineering lifecycle products, delivered through web, phone, and local shops across 80 countries. Team members from Elemental Concept have worked with this client since the early 2000s.
Opportunity
The client is midway through a major re-platforming effort, shifting their e-commerce operation to a modern cloud-native stack. The new platform now handles a significant percentage of customer interactions - but the original Java platform, built with Elemental Concept's help over two decades and running on a JBoss Application Server with an Oracle relational database, still underpins the ecommerce channel for larger customers who depend on complex, tailored functionality not yet replicated in the cloud.
With the internal development team focused on building the new platform, maintaining and extending a 20-year-old Java monolith with significant technical debt alongside that work wasn't a viable long-term arrangement. The client needed a way to keep the legacy platform running reliably for customers who depended on it, while giving the internal team space to focus on the future.
Approach
Elemental Concept was engaged to take full ownership of the legacy Java platform, a natural extension of a relationship that had included building the platform originally and, by 2015, helping the client recruit and train the in-house team that ran it. We built a hybrid UK and India team for a long-term engagement, providing ongoing platform support, implementing critical features, and managing the organised decommissioning of the platform as new capabilities are progressively transitioned to the cloud.
The internal team's focus is now entirely on the cloud-native future. The legacy platform continues to serve the customers who depend on it, with EC absorbing the complexity of the technical debt so that complexity doesn't sit across both tracks simultaneously.
Outcomes
The client's internal development team is free to focus on the platform that will define the business's next phase. Key functionality used by larger customers continues to operate reliably. And the legacy platform is being wound down in an orderly, sequenced way, with new capabilities moving to the cloud as they become available, rather than the old platform being either abandoned prematurely or maintained indefinitely beyond its useful life.
