By Antone Gonsalves
Next Pathway did not provide direct pricing for Shift Cloud. The company generally charges $7 to $8 per translated object. A large code base will have around 20,000 objects, costing between $140,000 and $160,000 to translate.
Next Pathway addresses only one of many complex problems when migrating a data warehouse to the cloud, said Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at IT research and consulting firm Intellyx.
“Customers who need to move their ETL logic to the cloud are going to find this quite useful,” he said. “But I would say it is — relatively speaking — a rather narrow offering.”
Next Pathway claims to successfully convert 80% of legacy ETL code to new code, leaving the remainder to companies or systems integrators to handle manually. However, the 80% number is difficult to confirm because the code could be functionally equivalent to the old logic but unreadable by developers, making it impossible to maintain, Bloomberg said.
“My research didn’t show how maintainable the Next Pathway-generated code is,” he said.
Shift Cloud will be most helpful to companies with a need to perform ETL translation regularly across a variety of complex projects, Bloomberg said. Those companies can pay for the SaaS offering on an as-needed basis.
“Next Pathway wants to be able to sell customers something they will continue to use, and SaaS lends itself to that,” he said. “But if it’s just a one-and-done [project], then you might as well just send it to a consultant and let them do it.”
