Case Study: Enterprise-Scale Data Migration with Agentic Automation
As part of being appointed to deliver Downer Group’s Federated Factory a unified data hub spanning multiple business units insightfactory.ai was also entrusted with one of the most complex and critical elements of the program: migrating a diverse portfolio of legacy warehouses and data platforms into a single modern Lakehouse.
The scale of the challenge was immense. Downer’s existing environment included a significant number of source systems tightly integrated with incumbent warehouses, large and intricate code bases that had evolved over time in multiple languages, and thousands of dashboards, reports, and dependent applications that all needed to be carefully repointed to the new platform. At the same time, the organisation required the establishment of consistent governance, connectivity, and data-sharing across the broader mesh to ensure that the migration not only replaced old systems but elevated the way data was managed and consumed.
To deliver this transformation, insightfactory.ai deployed a coordinated approach that brought together its senior professional services migration team, the Federated Factory platform, and the AgenticMigration.AI framework. This combination provided both the technical foundation and the automation required to handle a program of such scope and complexity with speed and accuracy.
By leveraging this model, a small, high-performing team has been able to execute the migration at a pace and scale that would be unachievable through traditional methods dramatically reducing cost, risk, and delivery timelines. The program remains in flight but is tracking to plan, budget, and schedule, positioning Downer Group to rapidly realise the benefits of a consolidated, governed, and scalable Lakehouse foundation that will underpin the organisation’s broader digital transformation.
“insightfactory.ai has been highly effective and instrumental in not only standing up the Federated Factory platform, but also in driving the migration of legacy systems into the new Data Hub. Significant volumes of data are already live in the platform, unlocking new capabilities across the organisation and enabling me to streamline and accelerate my vision for digital transformation at Downer.”
Nicola Dorling - Group CIO
The Problem
Data migrations in large enterprises are notoriously difficult. They are often lengthy and costly programs that run over time and budget, while being highly error-prone and dependent on manual reconciliation. In many cases, the investment in migration outweighs the benefits of re-platforming, resulting in a poor return on investment and programs that ultimately fail to deliver on their promise.
For Downer, these inherent challenges were magnified by the scale and complexity of its federated environment. Each business unit maintained its own technology stack, leading to a sprawling legacy landscape characterised by fragmented data, duplicated datasets, and an extensive code base that had evolved organically over many years across multiple languages and platforms.
The task was not only to consolidate these disparate systems into a single modern Lakehouse, but also to ensure that critical business operations could continue uninterrupted. This required repointing a significant number of adjacent applications (such as Power BI dashboards, Power Apps solutions, and other reporting systems) that had long been tightly coupled to the legacy infrastructure. At the same time, Downer needed to establish a standardised governance model, ensure performance and reliability at scale, and create a foundation that would support future digital transformation initiatives.
This created a migration program of overwhelming scope and complexity—one that demanded not just technical execution, but a strategic approach to mitigate the risk of disruption and failure.
The Solution
To address the scale and complexity of this program, insightfactory.ai delivered a coordinated migration approach anchored in its Federated Factory model. At the heart of this model is a mesh of Insight Factory instances, each deployed to serve the needs of individual business units, while remaining fully integrated into a single, governed data hub. This architecture provides the balance of centralised governance with decentralised agility, enabling Downer to achieve a unified Lakehouse experience without sacrificing flexibility at the business-unit level.
Through this model, insightfactory.ai has been able to execute one of the largest and most complex migrations in the organisation’s history at pace and with precision. The Federated Factory platform provides standardised ingestion, transformation, and governance capabilities across the enterprise, ensuring consistency and quality. This is supported by the deep expertise of insightfactory.ai’s professional services team, whose senior engineers bring extensive experience in large-scale migrations, allowing them to guide and de-risk the program from end to end.
Critically, the migration is accelerated by the use of AgenticMigration.AI, a full agentic framework designed to automate multi-stage migration processes that would traditionally be manual and error-prone. From data extraction through to transformation, validation, and deployment, agentic automation is reducing effort, eliminating reconciliation bottlenecks, and enabling a small, highly capable team to deliver outcomes that would otherwise require a much larger workforce.
The result is a migration program that is not only delivering at speed, but also tracking on time, on budget, and with reduced risk all while being rolled out in parallel with the Federated Factory program itself. Each business unit its own modernised instance of the Insight Factory, with data ingested once, validated, and deployed directly into production-ready Lakehouse environments, establishing the foundation for Downer’s broader data transformation journey.
The Value Delivered
Although the program is still underway, it is already driving measurable transformation across Downer Group. The migration effort remains firmly on track, with the project team positioned to complete the transition of all legacy data sources into the Lakehouse environment before year-end. This achievement is particularly significant given the scope of systems and code bases involved.
The introduction of automation through AgenticMigration.AI has dramatically reduced delivery timelines, allowing a small, focused team to execute work that would traditionally require far greater resources and months of additional effort. Built-in validation and reconciliation processes have lowered the risk of errors and rework, ensuring that data is migrated accurately and consistently the first time.
The adoption of the Federated Factory platform is also establishing a standardised technology footprint across the organisation. This not only streamlines current reporting and BI workloads but also enables Downer to more easily embed advanced analytics, AI, and agentic capabilities across its business units. At the same time, the platform has been designed for scalability, allowing future migrations and onboarding of new data sources to be completed at speed and with minimal disruption.
By combining platform innovation, intelligent automation, and deep professional services expertise, insightfactory.ai has transformed what could have been an unmanageable, high-risk program into one that is both economically and operationally viable. In doing so, Downer is not only modernising its data foundations but also unlocking the full potential of its investment in a modern Lakehouse environment—positioning the organisation for long-term digital transformation.
