Building the Fundamentals
Early on, BJ’s engaged Cloud Technology Partners, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise com-
pany, to begin building a framework for transitioning to the cloud. This framework
focused on six core pillars: Strategy and Economics, Security and Governance, Applica-
tions and Architecture, Portfolio Migration, DevSecOps and CloudOps. BJ’s organized
around these pillars and set up agile pods for each, developing and prioritizing its back-
log to optimize how the company attacked the work.
As BJ’s made incremental progress, momentum grew, as well as internal excitement
over the cloud program. The company made sure it saw quick wins in both developing
internal skills and demonstrating high business value.
Organizing for Success
BJ’s next challenge was transitioning the organization from a traditional software devel-
opment life cycle (SDLC) while simultaneously continuing to support the business. In
other words, the company needed to support legacy systems while transforming the
organization to cloud technologies.
The warehouse club operator created two core groups to be cloud evangelists and help
move the transition forward. A Cloud Technologies group was chartered to focus enter-
prise architecture on cloud design thinking. This group would be engaged early and
often in every go-forward initiative to ensure that a cloud-first mindset was always a top
consideration. Simultaneously, the company created a Cloud Operations and Engineer-
ing group focused on DevSecOps and cloud optimization. BJ’s supported these groups
primarily with internal resources, providing them with everything they needed to grow
their expertise.
Migrating to the Cloud
One of BJ’s key priorities was ensuring its Cloud Data Security Strategy was well archi-
tected and operationally supported before beginning the transition. Though starting
small, BJ’s built its cloud migration momentum by leveraging its successes, and continu-
ing to master the new services introduced each week by its cloud providers. BJ’s moved
two SAP applications – SAP CAR (Customer Activity Repository) and SAP PMR (Promo-
tion Management for Retail) – and centralized their data in the cloud. CAR and PMR
were hybrid implementations working with BJ’s SAP ERP on-premises solution. Next,
BJ’s migrated its e-commerce platform, IBM WebSphere Commerce and Order Manage-
ment, into the cloud, taking advantage of compute on-demand, auto scaling, and several
other cloud services to best manage the cyclical nature of e-commerce demand.
Recently, BJ’s migrated its teradata data warehouse platform to the Amazon Redshift
solution in the cloud. The retailer also shifted away from its on-premises data analysis
solution, so that it could provide an improved shopping experience for members. Turn-
ing to the public cloud, BJ’s created a data lake, and hired data scientists to help analyze
8 | THE DOPPLER |
SPRING 2019