Content Acquisition and Enrichment Platform Upgrade — Phase 1: Replacing a Decade-Old Custom System with SAP BusinessObjects Data Services.

About the Client

Company N is a leading global provider of business news and information. Company N aggregates content from more than 30,000 licensed and free sources spanning some 200 countries and dozens of languages, delivering research, monitoring, and risk and compliance data to enterprise customers worldwide. Every one of these products depends on accurate, richly structured metadata attached to incoming content.

Industry Context

The discipline this project modernized — automated text analysis and entity extraction — has continued to grow in strategic importance for content and information businesses. The explosive growth of Web and social media content that first drove Company N to outgrow its legacy platform in 2012 has only accelerated, and today’s information providers face an analogous challenge at even greater scale: producing metadata precise and trustworthy enough to ground generative AI products. Company N has since expanded into a licensed content marketplace and launched generative-AI features, which depend on the kind of clean, well-disambiguated entity data this project’s data-quality upgrades produced. A scalable, enterprise-wide content processing platform — rather than a system purpose-built for a single product — is what allows an information provider to keep meeting that bar as content volume and product demands keep growing.

Current Situation

CAEP’s legacy platform could not satisfy Company N’s current or future business needs for two structural reasons: it was designed more than a decade earlier around Company N’s requirements alone, and the intervening growth of the Web and social media had dramatically increased incoming content volume beyond what the platform was built to handle. Every Company N product, service, and editorial application needed additional content types and richer metadata than the legacy system could produce. Company N concluded that a new, single, enterprise-wide content processing platform was the most cost-effective way to meet these needs, and selected Iknow to provide the business consulting, technology consulting, and systems integration services required to deliver it.

• A single-purpose legacy platform. CAEP’s text analysis and entity extraction functionality had been custom-built more than a decade earlier for Company N alone, leaving it structurally unable to serve the full range of Company N products that now depended on it.
• Outpaced content volume. The rapid growth of published articles and Web and social media content had pushed incoming volume well beyond what the legacy platform could reliably process.
• Growing metadata demands. Company N’s products and editorial applications increasingly required additional types of content and metadata that the existing text analysis implementation was never designed to produce.
• Zero tolerance for disruption. Any replacement of the platform’s core text analysis engine had to preserve uninterrupted service to a live production pipeline feeding Company N’s multiple structured-data products.

• Install, configure, test, and integrate SAP BusinessObjects Data Services v4.1 into the CAEP environment.
• Migrate the platform’s legacy text analysis functionality to Data Services with equivalent functional behavior.
• Establish development, integration/test, and production environments to support the new platform going forward.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks under production-representative content volumes.
• Deliver a technical foundation and Phase 2 recommendations to guide the remainder of the multi-year modernization program.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow followed a structured systems development and integration methodology: install and configure the new platform’s environments, analyze and document the legacy system it was replacing, build and test equivalent functionality on the new platform, integrate it into production, and document both the results and the recommended path for subsequent phases.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Platform Installation & Environment Setup. Iknow downloaded and installed the current version of SAP BusinessObjects Data Services, then set up development, integration/test, and production environments configured to run in Company N’s technical environment.
• Legacy System Analysis. The team analyzed and documented the inputs and outputs of the existing text analysis implementation to establish a precise functional baseline for the migration.
• Functional Migration. Iknow designed, developed, and implemented text analysis functionality in Data Services that replicated the legacy system’s behavior, then integrated the calls to and from Data Services with the rest of the CAEP platform.
• Testing & Performance Tuning. The new text analysis functionality was tested against a range of unstructured text samples, and performance test data was analyzed to identify and resolve processing bottlenecks before go-live.
• Documentation & Knowledge Transfer. Iknow produced the full set of technical documentation for the new implementation and a detailed write-up of project results and key learnings.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow coordinated with Company N’s technical staff and platform architects — many of the same subject-matter experts engaged during the CAEP documentation effort covered in Iknow Case Study #142 — as well as the editorial and product teams whose applications depended on the platform’s metadata output, including the Company’s editorial coding services.

Replicating a Decade-Old, Custom System Precisely

Migrating text analysis functionality without a precise understanding of its existing behavior risked subtle differences in output that could ripple through every downstream product relying on that metadata. Iknow addressed this by first analyzing and documenting the legacy implementation’s inputs and outputs in detail, then validating the new Data Services implementation against a wide range of unstructured text samples to confirm functional equivalence before integration.

Upgrading Core Infrastructure Without Disrupting a Live, High-Volume Pipeline

CAEP could not go offline; it was processing up to one million articles a day for products in continuous use. Iknow mitigated this risk with dedicated development, integration/test, and production environments, and by running structured performance testing to identify and resolve processing bottlenecks before the new Data Services functionality went live in production.

Operational Outcomes

• Installed, configured, tested, and integrated the current version of SAP BusinessObjects Data Services into the Content Acquisition & Enrichment Platform.
• Migrated the platform’s legacy text analysis and entity extraction functionality onto Data Services with equivalent functional behavior.
• Introduced new data cleansing and data quality features essential for standardizing entity extraction outputs and supporting entity disambiguation reference databases.
• Introduced analytics capabilities to monitor platform performance and analyze results on an ongoing basis.

Strategic and Organizational Outcomes

The project launched Company N’s transition to a market-leading, web-services-based ETL and workflow platform, replacing a single-purpose legacy system with infrastructure capable of serving the company’s full product portfolio. Company N customers gained a measurably better experience — more content ingested, more accurate and precise search results, and richer data display and visualization — and the project directly supported development of Company N’s editorial coding services. Iknow also delivered a Phase 2 Recommendations Document, providing Company N with a clear, evidence-based path to continue the platform’s modernization.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow completed the installation, testing, and integration of SAP BusinessObjects Data Services within the four-month engagement, delivering a production-ready platform upgrade and a defined set of recommendations for Phase 2 of the broader CAEP modernization program.

Core Skills

• Technology consulting & systems integration
• Enterprise data integration platform implementation
• Text analytics & entity extraction engineering
• Data quality & entity disambiguation

Methods & Frameworks

• Legacy system analysis and functional-equivalence migration methodology
• Performance testing and bottleneck analysis
• Technical architecture and low-level design documentation

Technologies & Tools

• SAP BusinessObjects Data Services v4.1 — ETL, text analysis, data quality, and metadata management