Nationwide, a Fortune 100 company based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the largest and strongest diversified insurance and financial services organizations in the United States. An industry leader in driving customer-focused innovation, Nationwide provides a full range of insurance and financial services products. Nationwide’s culture is focused on putting people first by fostering a diverse, equitable and truly inclusive environment.
Nationwide partnered with auticon for a large and complex data warehouse project, migrating from Netezza to Snowflake. For 20 years, IBM’s Netezza has been a high-performing hardware acceleration process with field-programmable gate arrays, which were fine-tuned to process analytic queries at light speed. Recently, IBM has been eliminating support for the product. As a result, Nationwide is migrating its data warehousing capabilities to the cloud with Snowflake.
auticon’s team of 4 consultants – all on the autism spectrum – are validating data migrations by checking the Snowflake database’s data against the source data it came from.
A key task of this data migration project is testing large schemas—600+ tables of up to millions or billions of rows. To succeed at this project, auticon’s team of consultants was given on-the-job training in Databricks, a platform used to perform analysis when running SQL queries on data lakes using python and pySpark. They make heavy use of Databricks, which runs the same queries against both source and target and ensures that export inconsistencies on either end don’t give false alarms.
Through the challenge of learning Databricks, auticon’s team is on a path to certification and career growth.
“It requires a human touch to successfully execute a data migration project of this magnitude. Accuracy and data integrity are crucial. We felt confident in deploying auticon for this effort because of its reputation for delivering first-class work. At Nationwide, we take pride in the diversity of our workforce, and auticon is clearly a partner with similar beliefs.”
Jim Fowler, EVP, Chief Technology Executive at Nationwide
Nationwide has been an outstanding partner in Columbus, Ohio. They allowed four autistic data engineers to find full-time employment through auticon. The team is deep into its Databricks training and has been successful. The team is working towards certification with a large portion of the 600+ tables successfully migrated.