Admiral Group began using Teradata a few years ago because it was finding it difficult to update its old mainframe system to add new insurance products.
Explaining the company’s data warehouse plans, James Gardiner, data warehouse technical lead at Admiral, says: “We wanted to use the US GuideWire software to spin up new products. But all data was coming from the mainframe accessed via SAS or Excel.
However, Gardiner admits that the Teradata project was slow and painful. “The project was run tactically to ensure the new system went in on time,” he says. “We ran a waterfall methodology and hand-coded Teradata. We had a complicated extract, translate and load (ETL) process to move data from our source systems into Teradata and the documentation was out of date.”
Following the implementation, the company wanted to try to reimplement the data warehouse project. “We found the traditional method of implementation was not aligned to the business,” says Gardiner.
Because Admiral’s database team were not Teradata experts, Admiral needed Teradata consultants to write custom lines of code by hand for each business request. The company wanted a more agile approach to updating its Teradata data warehouse to enable it to turn around business requirements quickly, says Gardiner.
Admiral began looking at how it could automate the code generation for the Teradata data warehouse, he adds. “We did a proof of concept with WhereScape, which allowed us to become agile, so we could change our methodology.”
By using WhereScape, according to Gardiner, the data warehouse team can now work with the business on rapidly prototyping new ideas, which can then be further developed into products. “We can speed up development by six to eight times and be more flexible with the business,” he says.
“Essentially, we can load data a lot quicker. Admiral will try a lot of different products and spin up trials quickly to see if they bring in new customers.”
To support this, Gardiner says WhereScape allows Admiral to build warehouse components very quickly. Previously, this would have taken months.
The team supporting Teradata is also a lot smaller. “The new WhereScape project has 20 people on the team,” he says. “The previous tactical project had 60 to 80 people.”
Given that Admiral’s data team is mainly trained in SQL Server, Gardiner says: “We can take someone in SQL Server and get this building on Teradata, without lots of hand-holding.”
