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Cloud-Ready GIS, Connected Enterprise: An Upgrade, a Versioning Change, and a Cloud Migration, All at Once

10 minutes ago
2 min read

How Magnolia River moved a gas and electric utility’s ArcGIS Enterprise to Azure and kept SAP in sync.



A regulated natural gas and electric utility in the Northeast ran ArcGIS Enterprise 10.9.1 on aging on-premises hardware, leaving it vulnerable if the site failed. The company brought in Magnolia River to move the system to Microsoft Azure and upgrade to ArcGIS Enterprise 11.5. The bigger challenge was that the GIS sent data to SAP S/4HANA through 136 integration specs, and each one needed to keep working through a new platform, a new database, and a new versioning model—all at once.


Migration Highlights


  • High availability with rolling maintenance windows

  • Public URLs preserved through cutover

  • One current row per feature in every SAP extract

  • Write-back tested for version state, reruns, and

    inserts

  • Lighter database load from leaner map services


Magnolia River worked entirely remotely to set up matching development and production environments in Azure. They deployed ArcGIS Enterprise for high availability and put the enterprise geodatabase on a managed SQL database. The team converted the production geodatabase from traditional to branch versioning in place, then rebuilt the data layer that feeds SAP. Using Import, GeoCurrent’s ETL tool, they repointed and checked all 94 database-sourced specs one by one and made sure the 42 file-based specs were unaffected.


Key Project Stats


  • 136 GIS-to-SAP integration specs inventoried

  • 94 Database specifications repointed one by one

  • 35 Latest-record SQL views authored

  • 5 to 1 Queries per map draw on the primary editing service


The utility’s GIS now runs in Azure with high availability, rolling maintenance, and no risk of a single-site failure. The public URL stayed the same after the cutover. Every SAP feed—from gas and electric locations to work orders, coordinate feeds, and asset accounting extracts—made it through the upgrade, versioning change, and cloud migration without any issues.


👉 To learn more about GIS Services visit: https://www.magnolia-river.com/gis

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