Altares, a major player in the value-added sales information on companies, has chosen Stambia for data migration and data processing projects.

Altares, major player in high added value company information sales, has a duty to offer reliable, accurate and complete data, but must also provide to its customers the means to discover, explore and analyze the information.

In order to meet this need to discover and explore data, Altares created a new offer: "Intuiz". This portal uses new concepts in terms of interface, navigation and data representation. Intuiz allows the customers to progressively explore and cross various information, such as numerical nomenclatures, financial results, or the prevailing legal texts.

Stakes of the project

The project had two major challenges :

  •  Migrate all the data history for all French companies over the last 25 years into the new Intuiz system. Technically, this meant transporting, tranforming and checking more than a billion lines.
  •  Subsequently enable the daily loading of data into the new system.

Key numbers of the project

  •  More than 850 million lines dealt with during the initial project
  •  A history of more than 20 years about French companies
  •  Project was realized 7 days ahead of the planning
  •  Data dealt with at a speed of 9 million lines per hour

Key factors to the project's success

Performance and reliability

Stambia's ELT approach of the transformations allowed for a response time consistent with the project's issues.

Agility and openness

Stambia's great openness and natural malleability enabled Altares to adapt Stambia's standard components, so they could take into account the particular functional problematics of the project. They especially focused on traceablity and keeping track of the history of the data changes.

Editor's presence

Finally, the solution's simplicity and the presence of the editor alongside the development and design teams greatly contributed to the respect of the deadlines and the success of the project. Also, Altares teams were able to become rapidly autonomous and master the new concepts.

Technical background

  •  Starting the Intuiz project required migrating the data from a DB2/400 environment to an Oracle environment.
  •  The transition from the current operational system to the new software architecture involved not only transport, but also transformation and normalization of the data, so it would be in the format required by Intuiz.
  •  Since Altares' trade is mainly based on data quality, a high number of controls and cross verifications had to take place during the migration, to make sure the semantics of the output data hadn't been modified.
  •  Today, the daily flows that feed Intuiz continue to be loaded through a Stambia architecture.

Altares, the company

Altares is a major player in the area of information about companies. Its expertise: its knowledge of companies from the inside. Altares is born of the merger of two companies : BIL (Base d’Informations Légales) and Dun & Bradstreet France.

Altares' customers have a unique global access to qualified data concerning more than 150 million companies throughout the world, in more than 220 countries.