Global exploration and production company Neptune Energy has opted to migrate its IBM Maximo asset management system to the cloud, following the closure of one of its German data centres.

One of the main challenges the firm faced was how to successfully transfer all the necessary data without causing any disruption to its German gas and oil operations.

Neptune Energy operates and develops onshore gas and oil fields across Germany. It uses IBM’s Maximo as a maintenance management system to improve the productivity, efficiency and safety of assets.

Traditionally, the process of upgrading and migrating Maximo can cause costly downtime and inconvenience for support staff and system users. To ensure a smooth transition to the cloud and mitigate the risk of any disruption, Neptune Energy turned to tech specialist SRO Solutions to oversee a zero downtime, lift-and-shift migration.

The Manchester-based firm, part of The Cohesive Companies, is a Gold Accredited IBM Business Partner, and able to offer a downtime-free Maximo upgrade and data migration service.

Bill Wallace, technical director at SRO Solutions, said: “The closure of the German data centre meant Neptune Energy was under severe time restrictions, but they also wanted to make sure the migration would not impact the day-to-day running of the business. Our bespoke Data Utility tool (SDU) was designed for exactly this type of situation, enabling data migrations with minimal operational risk and no impact to system users.

“Some companies simply cannot afford to have outages or downtime when migrating their databases. The SDU tool eliminates this risk by allowing the current production system to remain operational while data from Maximo is moved across. Any changes made to the current system are automatically synchronised. The new environment can also be thoroughly tested to identify potential issues before a final switchover takes place.

“This approach gave Neptune Energy the assurance that the go-live would be successful and reduced the possibility of having to roll-back to the old system, a situation that would have placed them under even greater time pressure to exit their data centre in Germany.”

The entire data migration project was carried out remotely, with SRO Solutions liaising directly with Neptune Energy’s colleagues in the UK and Germany.