Caylent Research on Database Migrations: What to Know

National services provider Caylent recently released the results of a survey focused on trends in database migration projects within the enterprise market. We spoke with Ryan Gross, the company’s head of data and applications, about the results and how Caylent is leveraging AI to better support its own clients.

Why database migrations are rarely completed on time

The survey polled over 300 IT leaders (non-Caylent customers) across industries, including education, finance and financial services, entertainment and leisure, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, and utilities, energy and extraction. Respondents held senior roles ranging from IT managers to CTOs.

One of the top takeaways from the results, which Gross says surprised even the Caylent team, was the number of respondents who reported their migration took longer than initially expected. Only six percent of respondents stated their most complex migration was completed on time.

“What we see a lot is that there’s just a lot of improper expectation-setting upfront,” said Gross.

Respondents said the top three time-intensive tasks in their most challenging migration were: 

• moving data from the source to the target database, 
• testing the target database (including all integrations), and 
• converting the database schemas for the target platform.

To address what has historically been a timely (and often costly) endeavor, Gross says the team leverages generative and agentic AI throughout its processes to estimate the full scope of work, build and test environments pre-migration, and more.

“AI has been an unlock for us to help customers understand the scope of the project and when it can be completed,” Gross said. “We’re moving a lot of that estimation process into what had previously been pre-sales conversations. Now we can deploy our agents and analyze their existing structures basically right after the first intro call to provide timelines and understand the project much earlier.”

Most respondents also reported using AI during migration, with 77% indicating that it was effective or highly effective in their migrations. 

How much even a few hours of downtime can cost an organization

Beyond the mismatched expectations discussed above, migrations also come with the risk of downtime and its potential impact on operations. According to the study, numerous organizations have experienced partial or complete downtime during their complex migrations.

• Nearly half (46%) of respondents experienced five or more hours of downtime during their most challenging migration.
• Downtime during challenging migrations led to customer experience issues (51%), lost revenue (49%), and operational slowdowns (44%).

“I think a lot of companies understand the impact downtime has on operations, but they go into these migrations with rose-colored glasses and think it won’t happen to them in particular,” Gross said.

Gross adds that downtime, like overall concerns over timing, can often be attributed to errors in the planning process. He says that too many organizations still miss or don’t fully consider the testing phase before deployment, and then encounter delays and downtime issues as they need to address bugs and other errors.

Vendor lock-in: always a concern, but now enterprises see change as possible

Of course, migrations actually start with an idea: organizations determine that the existing setup is no longer working, and they begin to look for alternatives and carefully plan how to lift legacy systems and replace them with new ones.

To Gross, this commitment has long been viewed as too burdensome by many enterprises. Still, recent industry shakeups, such as the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, have prompted many organizations to reassess their reliance on specific vendors.

“Vendor lock-in has always been a concern to many IT leaders, but they didn’t really have the financial justifications to take on the risks and the long-term ROI calculation associated with these large migrations,” said Gross. “Many just felt they had no real choice, but that has definitely shifted.”

According to the survey results, the top motivators as to why IT leaders migrated include: 

• removing vendor lock-in (34%), 
• reducing spend on database licensing (28%), and 
• increasing scalability (13%).

Gross says that the ability to leverage AI tooling throughout the process, combined with the general availability of more vendors in the marketplace, has given many enterprise organizations a new equation for determining the ROI on large-scale migrations.

Why channel partners like Caylent remain critical parts of an organization’s tech strategy

Gross told us Caylent commissioned the research in part to measure what its leadership felt it was seeing in the market. To him, the survey results largely confirmed what he already felt to be true: the enterprise demand for migration support is reaching new heights. 

“We are seeing so many more companies take a really hard look at their systems, most of them now starting to plan for 2026 budget cycles,” said Gross. “That lock-in problem is less and less likely to feel insurmountable over the next few years, and more companies will likely begin migrating as a result.”

For Caylent, an AWS premier-tier partner and migration expert, this new wave of interest in modernizing is an opportunity to leverage their services to better support enterprise clients. 

As Gross points out, while the survey results focus on database migrations, many enterprises don’t stop there– cloud migrations and even a heightened focus on SaaS technology are also on the roadmap for most of these organizations.

“I do think the next few years will see us approaching a ‘new normal’ in which more and more enterprises move away from the vendor lock-in they’re facing right now,” Gross said. “AI agents also change the way that UI needs to be built, and I think many organizations will need to rethink their architecture to adapt to new technologies.”