Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing), discuss data migration and the problems associated with it.

Part 2 of a 6-part series (Return to Part 1)

RON: So let's talk about the data itself and bringing the data over. You've talked about the team. And we wanted to heavily articulate, even if you select a team—we'll just use Clarity for right now—you saw a really cool demo of the Clarity eAuction platform, and you want to go with us. Of course, Clarity knows the Clarity platform, but does Clarity know the hundred other platforms you may be migrating from?  

Being data migration specialists, because we've converted and moved clients from every eCommerce platform in the world and from disparate and proprietary platforms in the world to our eCom platform, we already have that background. So no matter what platform the data is in, we're very comfortable even when the data, like you said, doesn't have the foreign keys. I mean, when I'm working with clients on their product data, more than 95% fall in that dirty data category. They have their data, it took many, many years to get their data so it's even working in their current eCom platform of their current auction platform, but it got there from 45 different data sources.  

So now when it's time to pack up and move it to us, they either have those same 45 data sources and it's all disjointed and not normalized—that's really the big one, most of the data is never normalized. But we need to be able to get access to that data, like you said, either through an endpoint API, or we can call and extract the data through some database for eCommerce. We can go in and run queries and export the data, but it’s also dependent on how structured that data...where it is...that helps us pull it over.  

We've had a handful—fortunately not a lot—but we've had a handful of clients that have ditched their last online auction eCommerce platform before they came to us, and then we didn't have access to their old platform. They were paying $18,000 a month [to someone else] for hosting, and they didn't want to pay that. And so we were literally just starting to go look at the data and migrate the data—we hadn't even pulled any data yet—and they turned around and stopped paying, and that client didn't have a backup and they lost all their data.  

It was bad, so make sure that, when you work with the vendor, you persist and maintain whatever relationship you have with your prior eAuction platform and/or vendor to give your new vendor time to get access, to get the structure to read, see what you're doing, fully understand and document, and then back up and get the data out so that they've got the data to be able to move to the new platform before you make any rash decisions. 

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CHRIS: That's right. There are so many good points there. I just want to dive into a couple briefly. You were talking about how, whenever you are moving from one vendor to another and one eCommerce auction platform to another, there's a lot of data that could be unnecessary.  

That is a key takeaway, and it's like moving houses a lot of times.  What I've found, whenever I've moved, it was really challenging, no matter what. And there was pretty much nothing I could do about that. Every time I've moved, I've gotten a bigger place and there's more stuff to move. And that's probably going to be the same thing for your business.  

Even if you're focusing on a specific niche and you technically have a smaller B2B or C2C eCommerce auction focus, there's a lot of work that goes into reducing the clutter and reducing the noise because you're going to tend toward accumulating data that isn't necessary to operate the business.  

This can create an inertia that slows down the performance of the application. If we bring too much data over, that isn't helpful. And it can also be mostly just confusing to the users. You really want to be methodical about cleaning your data and keeping it manicured, if you will. And ultimately, this is a great opportunity to do that. Whenever you're moving from one auction eCommerce platform to another, it's a great opportunity to go in and clean things up and not bring certain things over.  

However, it's possible, depending on your timeline, to just straight up bring everything over. And the one caveat here is, typically the passwords—because of security, there may be other fields like this too—but they're going to be in a one-way hash. And by definition, we're not going to be able to get those out of the system.  

There are ways to work through that if, absolutely necessary. But ultimately, when you're moving from one eAuction platform to another, it's just best practice to plan on having the users update their password information anyway. This can be couched because of the upgrade, plus reinforcing our security and enforcing higher security standards. “As a best practice, we’re requesting that everyone update their password information.”  

Continue to Part 3 to learn about switching vendors.