The global organization of IT projects has become commonplace, with India, in particular, establishing itself as a cost-effective location. However, in the fall of 2018, the situation was reversed: an Indian company commissioned SaaS Web in Karlsruhe as a partner for a migration project.
CyberTech, headquartered in Mumbai, is a global specialist in “Outsourced Support” with over 500 employees, offering professional support for various software solutions, including SAP and Salesforce. To manage the numerous customer inquiries, CyberTech has long used the OTRS ticketing/helpdesk system.
OTRS itself is not new; it has existed for decades. There is a paid, hosted version directly from the manufacturer OTRS AG, or a free, self-installable open-source solution called ((OTRS)) Community Edition. The latter is very widely used, partly because no license fees are incurred for the solution, and partly because, as open-source software, it has been continuously developed over time and is now very comprehensive in its functionality. It currently has hundreds of configuration options and can be used in almost all corporate structures, as well as adapted to existing business processes through extensions.
Like all software systems, OTRS also benefits from continuous updates. Focusing on its core business, the company apparently lost sight of its ticketing system, at least until an update could no longer be performed easily. For this, it now needed specialists – and CyberTech found them at SaaS Web.
The task was to migrate a ticket database larger than 2 GB from version 3.x to the then-current version 6.0.13. The goal was to avoid disrupting ongoing operations and prevent downtimes as much as possible. This also required adhering to the client’s schedule. This was a challenge because, with its own location in Chicago, CyberTech counts several large U.S. companies among its clients. While Chicago is 6 hours behind Karlsruhe, Mumbai is 4.5 hours ahead.
Therefore, only weekends were suitable for the process, specifically from Friday 6 PM to Sunday 8 PM. The update was carried out in two phases. First, a clone of the existing system was created, updated to the new version, and thoroughly tested at all levels. In the second phase, the actual migration was performed and subjected to another test run. This concluded successfully, so CyberTech is now working with the current OTRS Community Edition version. Or, to put it another way: it’s running smoothly…
