Google Cloud Next 25: How One Retailer Navigated Its Migration With Expert Help

At first glance, a cloud migration might not seem like a big lift for a company such as Jim’s Formal Wear. Unlike big chain stores, it mostly works behind the scenes through independently owned retail stores to rent and sell tuxedoes and other men’s formal wear.

Even so, when CIO Jeff Thurston began the process of migration his hodgepodge of on-premises technology to the Google Cloud Platform, he knew he didn’t want to go it alone — and in the end he’s glad he didn’t.

“When we started talking about the migration to cloud, I reached out to the CDW account team to explore ways they could help us do that. It was new territory for us,” recalls Thurston. “I started at Jim’s Formal Wear about four years ago, and they were already a CDW customer, and I had been a CDW customer most of my career, so it just felt like a natural progression.”

Thurston was speaking at Google Cloud Next 25, the annual gathering of analysts, customers, journalists and others to compare notes and share best practices on how best to leverage Google Cloud Platform’s tools.

“We had a whole smattering of stuff,” he said, referring to the company’s former IT environment. “What we wanted to do was pick all that up and move it to the cloud. It’s not a straightforward process, so it was very helpful to have a resource we could lean on to make sure we were not going down the wrong path.”

It wasn’t just the hardware that was aging at Jim’s Formal Wear. The company was also dealing with the simultaneous retirements of most of its employees who specialized in Report Program Generator, better known as the RPG coding language associated with IBM technology. 

Thurston wanted the Trenton, Ill.-based company to take advantage of the benefits of Google Cloud, especially its advanced data analytics capabilities and artificial intelligence tools.

It made use of one of the latter in the wake of the RPG coder exodus. Michael Madison, a strategic Google Cloud architect with CDW, explained that he helped Jim’s Formal Wear leverage Google Gemini to help it understand what some of that RPG code was actually doing in its environment.

Meanwhile, the Jim’s Formal Wear team had been conducting analytics on its business using Google BigQuery, but there was a problem: Although it had built an interface between its own data and BigQuery, running queries during the business day would tax its own IT infrastructure and slow down business operations.

“It’s a single technology stack and it only has so much capacity,” Thurston explained. “If we do things during the during the day that impact production of the business, that can be a big deal.”

Madison said he created “a little system that could migrate their data to BigQuery from their DB2 instance without having to put additional load on their DB2 instance,” referring to on-premises IBM database hardware that Jim’s Formal Wear was using. That allowed the company to run its queries without interfering with business operations even though they ran them during the business day. 

Making the most efficient use of Google BigQuery also requires that an organization’s data is in the right shape for it, said Aimee Knight, a CDW strategic Google Cloud architect. She helped the Jim’s Formal Wear team partition the data it wanted to analyze from all the rest, lowering the costs of running queries, and cluster the data it received for more effective analysis.

“We were running some extensive queries on our system,” Thurston said. “Having someone we could bounce ideas off of, someone who had more experience with these tools than us, was extremely helpful.”

Many businesses find it invaluable to have that kind of experienced guidance when conducting their own cloud migrations. If you’re planning one of your own, find out more about how we can help.