Michael Kipling

Most cloud migrations stall on legacy systems, thin budgets, and stretched teams. In spring 2022, XMA set an ambitious objective: go full cloud by year-end and roll out a new ERP using an inexperienced team trained solely on on-premise T-SQL. They hit that goal and haven't stopped since. Today, they're actively trading manual data work for AI agents. Michael Kipling will walk through how he built XMA’s data engineering function from the ground up, starting with its strongest SQL developer and a single apprentice. With early support from consultancy SDG, the team had all reporting and analytics running from Snowflake within a year, fed by Matillion pipelines pulling from legacy SQL Server and the new ERP. Analytics became the first business unit to run fully in the cloud, on the smallest budget of the entire project. Modernization went far beyond migration. Maia by Matillion turned Snowflake into XMA's publication hub, filling ERP gaps for delivery proofs, asset data, and supplier ETAs while helping build a new product information management system. Maia also supports the team directly—training new engineers, applying pipeline fixes automatically, and converting hours of scripting into minutes. This session offers a candid account of real-world transformation.