The customer is a global private hospital group with operations across Europe and Africa. The Digital Solutions and Data Intelligence team manages the integration architecture connecting core HR systems—primarily SAP SuccessFactors and SAP EC Payroll—to a centralized SQL Server data warehouse the team calls the HR Vault. That warehouse feeds downstream reporting in Tableau, SAP Business Objects, and Power BI, as well as automation workflows in UiPath and data feeds to systems like Qualtrics, DocuSign, and Active Directory.
The HR Vault had been in operation since around 2017, with integration pipelines built and extended across multiple tools over that time. By early 2026, the organization was running roughly 270 ETL processes: the majority using SSIS with SAP's OData APIs to extract data from SuccessFactors, Boomi for delta integrations, and SAP Data Services for EC Payroll. An external deadline was about to force a change.
SAP announced it would deprecate basic authentication for SuccessFactors by November 2026. SSIS had no native OAuth support, and with 270 pipelines relying on that connection, the team needed a solution quickly. That search led to CData.
The challenge: An authentication deadline and a four-tool integration stack to simplify
The immediate problem was clear: the SSIS pipelines connecting to SuccessFactors via basic authentication would stop working when SAP removed support. SSIS had no native OAuth 2.0 capability, which meant the existing connector had to be replaced across every job.
Beyond the deadline, the team was managing HR data flows across four separate tools—SSIS, Boomi, SAP Data Services, and SAP Integration Center—each handling a different part of the pipeline. SSIS ran bulk SuccessFactors extracts. Boomi handled near-real-time delta loads every 10 minutes. SAP Data Services pulled from EC Payroll. SAP Integration Center covered certain write-back scenarios. The Group Manager wanted to reduce that complexity alongside solving the authentication problem.
There was also a persistent issue with deleted records. In SuccessFactors, when a record is canceled—a leave request, for instance—it is permanently deleted at the source without any flag or timestamp. The only way to detect the deletion downstream is to compare the full source dataset against the warehouse. With some tables already containing millions of rows, running full comparisons at scale was not viable. Boomi was too slow for this use case, and SSIS required the same full-refresh approach. No tool in the existing stack handled it reliably.
“SAP has given us notice that they will deprecate the basic authentication in November. We need a solution before November to keep all our ETL processes running.”
Group Manager
Digital Solutions and Data Intelligence, global healthcare organization
The solution: CData Sync as the primary integration layer for HR data
The Group Manager initially came to CData looking for an SSIS connector that supported OAuth 2.0 for SuccessFactors. While evaluating the CData SSIS component, the team also looked at CData Sync and recognized it as a broader opportunity—one that could address the authentication deadline and reduce the number of tools they were managing.
Sync's ability to replicate data directly into SQL Server, combined with its automatic metadata handling, worked with the existing HR Vault architecture. Critically, Sync operates alongside the SQL Server stored procedures the team had built for transformation—the job logic developed over years of SSIS work did not need to be rebuilt. Five transformations run out of Sync directly; the rest remain in SQL Server as stored procedures.
The team also confirmed that Sync's check cache capability provided a way to identify records deleted in SuccessFactors—addressing the hard-delete problem that had not been solvable with Boomi or SSIS at scale. CData's support team was available throughout the process: when the team hit connectivity or extraction challenges with different data providers, they received answers that helped them move forward.
The planned architecture going forward uses Sync as the primary extract-and-load layer, with the CData SSIS component retained for write-back scenarios where data flows from the warehouse back into SuccessFactors. Boomi, which was originally bundled with the SuccessFactors purchase, is being moved away from as each regional division gets its own instance—the new divisions will not receive Boomi as part of the SuccessFactors stack.
“CData Sync made it very easy for us to write the ETL processes to download data from SuccessFactors. The ease of use, the range of connectors, and being able to call on the support team whenever we got stuck—that's what made it valuable.”
Group Manager
Digital Solutions and Data Intelligence, global healthcare organization
The outcome: 270 pipelines converted, three divisions to follow
By mid-2026, the team had converted the majority of the 270 ETL processes to CData Sync. Pipelines that previously relied on basic authentication to SuccessFactors were running on OAuth 2.0, ahead of SAP's November 2026 deprecation deadline. Jobs handling flat files and CSV data were retained in SSIS where Sync was not the right fit.
The hard-delete problem that had been unresolvable with the previous toolset was addressed through Sync's check cache functionality, giving the team visibility into records deleted at source and keeping the HR Vault aligned with SuccessFactors.
The longer-term value is structural. As the organization separates into independent regional entities, each division will receive CData Sync as part of a packaged HR Vault deployment. Each entity will assume control of its own instance and license independently.
Looking further ahead, the Group Manager sees CData as a potential part of the organization's broader AI ambitions. The company is working toward a central AI assistant—drawing on SAP Joule, Microsoft Copilot, and other tools—with different data sets feeding it from the back end. The AI capabilities that CData can deliver through Connect AI have already caught his attention — the Group Manager identified several potential use cases after attending a product webinar, though noted the organization needs to get its data platform foundations in place before pursuing them.
“So far I've been impressed with the speed — it looks to be quite a lot faster than our SSIS OData integrations.”
Group Manager
Digital Solutions and Data Intelligence, global healthcare organization
CData Sync: Reliable replication without rebuilding your stack
CData Sync gives data engineering teams a direct path from source to destination without disrupting the transformation logic they've already built. For this organization, that meant converting 270 HR data pipelines to OAuth-ready connections—while keeping the SQL Server stored procedures and HR Vault architecture intact—and packaging that integration layer for deployment across three independent regional entities. To see how CData Sync fits your integration architecture, visit cdata.com/sync.
