CRM solutions also help companies consolidate data from many sources; streamline business processes and move to COTS systems. In fact, there are a myriad of reasons as to why a company might select a CRM system.

Irrespective of the reason, there is no doubt that CRM solutions can have a profound effect on business competitiveness.

CRM systems enable companies to:

• Improve customer satisfaction
  
• Reduce churn
  
• Streamline processes
  
• Reduce OPEX
  
• Consolidate systems better
  
• Utilise resources more effectively
  
• Bring consistency to the provisioning process
  
• Reduce reliance on manual processes.

Data migration challenges

Carrying out an application data migration programme involving a CRM system can be high risk with potential difficulties. CRM solutions are business critical. They operate 24/7. Organisations cannot afford to have these systems downtime for even a second.

In addition, CRM solutions are plugged into other business critical systems. IT professionals have to be extremely careful when they are migrating data from one of these systems to another. Any loss of data can be potentially catastrophic.

Typically, high volumes of data are involved in CRM application data migration projects. Any data migration project involving a CRM system needs to be handled by expert professionals who know exactly what they’re doing.

Current approaches

Traditional migration methods are in many cases no longer ‘fit for purpose’. They work on the principle that at some stage during the migration there will be a switchover. This involves a ‘staging’ copy of the data being taken offline – a recipe for business disruption.

Furthermore, most traditional technologies don’t have track and trace features. That means that IT professionals can’t keep tabs on the progress of a project, which increases the chance of failure.

These technologies provide little or no support for COTS application APIs.

And they are inflexible. Traditional data migration methods aren’t capable of adapting to the changing needs of a business.

Celona solution

Celona Evolve is the perfect platform for companies that want to move away from or upgrade existing legacy applications to new CRM systems. Businesses can rest assured that they can carry out their data migrations with no disruption and zero downtime.

The Celona Evolve platform migrates data through CPU and memory. This removes the need to stage data. Data can be copied between applications in real-time without any disruption to the business and with total synchronisation data is kept up to date in all applications. Handling data in this fashion also helps companies meet their regulatory responsibilities.

Celona Evolve allows IT to manage every aspect of a data migration project with confidence and 360 degree visibility. Administrators can use graphic UI tools to model and control the migration of single – or multiple applications – simultaneously.

And the solution provides full COTS application API support.

In short, Celona Evolve is a highly agile adaptive framework. It can easily align with the needs of any kind of business.