Hermes courier tackles Big Data needs

Home delivery specialist Hermes is tackling its Big Data needs by adopting a new data integration standard.

The courier is using DMExpress from Syncsort after trialling the technology in a successful mainframe migration project.

Within weeks of implementing DMExpress across the organisation, Hermes was able to transfer business-critical data between the company's Oracle and IBM DB2 database systems eight times faster than when using previous techniques, said the company.

In another example, previously it would frequently take the company up to two days of transaction development time to be able to move data from its point-of-sale (POS) system, which consists of approximately 1.5 million rows with 250 columns. This development time has now been cut to only one hour, giving Hermes' IT team more time to do other tasks.

DMExpress provides Hermes with a simple user interface to automatically code and transfer data.

Noel Kenningham, head of strategy and architecture at Hermes information systems, said: "Where we used to have to extract data from up to 10 different sources, we now only have to extract data from one source with DMExpress."

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