Why Legacy Migrations Fail And How We Fix It

Most migration projects fail when they focus solely on technical conversion while ignoring business transformation. At T1A we believe code is only half the story. Our approach is designed to make sure your business users can adopt and leverage new capabilities without disruption – because a migration only succeeds when your people succeed.

Our business-first methodology has been trusted by dozens of customers, delivering migrations in as little as 3 months and cutting user acceptance testing time by up to 70%.

‍Stories From the Field

Consider a major insurance company in Benelux that needed to transform its enterprise data warehouse while managing more than 1,600 ETL jobs in legacy systems. They didn’t just want a code conversion – they needed a true end-to-end transformation.

With Alchemist they achieved an 80% automation rate, dramatically reducing manual migration work. We also built an automated testing framework that cut UAT time by 70%, making rollout smoother and faster. Crucially, because their systems couldn’t afford downtime, we designed the migration infrastructure so old and new processes could run side by side, ensuring uninterrupted business operations throughout the transition.

Or take a leading telecom provider in Canada. Their challenge was modernizing complex BI reporting locked in legacy SAS, Oracle, and #Hadoop systems. Using Alchemist, we migrated critical managerial reports to Databricks, unlocking new speed and flexibility. But the transformation didn’t stop there: we enabled self-serve access via Unity Catalog, empowering business users to explore data without IT bottlenecks. And by establishing CI/CD pipelines and cost tagging, we delivered not just a migration, but a modern, accountable analytics platform built for sustainable innovation.

These are just two examples of what Alchemist enables: real migration success, not just code conversion. Because for us, migration means business enablement.

How Alchemist Delivers Business-Ready Migration

• Business-first planning: focused on real workflows so migrations don’t break critical operations
• Full visibility: Alchemist Analyzer maps your SAS environment, exposing dependencies and enabling accurate planning
• Accelerated adoption: automation cuts migration effort by up to 80%, supported with tailored training for your users
• Enterprise-ready foundation: Databricks with Unity Catalog and Medallion Architecture ensures security, compliance, and #AI integration while enabling self-service analytics

New Capabilities for Modern Data Teams

Alchemist now includes two important new features to make SAS migrations even more flexible:

• Hybrid LLM-enabled SAS conversion: our compiler technology + LLMs deliver fully translated, production-ready code without partial results

• New PySpark dialect: supports conversion of SAS (code, DI jobs, EG projects) to vendor-neutral Spark code, outputting Python modules (.py files) or Jupyter notebooks (.ipynb files)

Why Choose Alchemist by T1A?

• Alchemist was built for businesses that demand real transformation, not just a code dump
• 2x+ faster, 2x+ cheaper than manual migration
• See everything, analyze anything – Project Dashboard surfaces key insights instantly, backed by rich analytical data for unlimited exploration
• Ready-to-use outputs for Databricks notebooks, DLTs, pure PySpark python modules and Jupyter notebooks or low-code tools like Prophecy

Ready to modernize? Effective data management can make or break a business. If you want to stay competitive, let’s talk: https://t1a.com/offering/data-engineering