A Cloud Migration That Kept Everything That Worked

The Solution

Working with longtime partner Velosio, Equity resumed the project with a joint assessment to scope the most challenging problems first, chiefly by replacing SQL-dependent processes with cloud-compatible methods. Microsoft’s FastTrack program handled the heavy lifting of the data migration, and the team ran four full dry runs before go-live. Along the way, Equity’s IT director used Microsoft Copilot to refactor dozens of custom code libraries, work that would otherwise have required hiring additional developers.

A custom-built system reaches a turning point

Actors’ Equity Association was founded in 1913 as the first performing arts labor union in the country. More than a century later, it still protects the wages, working conditions, and benefits of actors and stage managers, from Broadway productions to regional theaters across the country. Supporting roughly 48,000 members means tracking who’s working, what they’re being paid, what they owe in dues, and what benefits they’ve earned, all through the same core system.

That system has been Microsoft Dynamics 365 since 2011, and for most of that time it has been self-hosted on Equity’s own servers. “It’s a critical system. I call it our core system,” says Doug Beebe, Equity’s Director of IT. Over a decade, the union built the platform into something highly tailored to its operations, from contract management tied to union agreements to a biannual dues billing process that touches every member at once.

That customization came at a cost. Behind the scenes, Equity’s small IT team was responsible for the servers underneath the system, along with the security, patching, and performance work that came with them. Moving those servers into Azure virtual machines in 2020 helped, but didn’t solve the bigger issue. Microsoft wasn’t going to support the on-premise platform indefinitely, and Equity needed to move before that became a crisis rather than a choice.

Equity and Velosio had already started talking about a cloud migration when COVID shut down live theater and, with it, most of Equity’s revenue. A discretionary infrastructure project wasn’t something the union could fund with Broadway dark, so the migration waited until theaters reopened and the union’s finances recovered. When Equity’s finances stabilized, the team restarted with a joint assessment, scoping out the hardest problems first.

A database six times the normal size

The assessment surfaced the migration’s central challenge early. Equity’s on-premise environment relied heavily on direct access to its SQL Server database, a pattern the cloud platform doesn’t support. “I would argue that was probably the biggest challenge of the project,” Beebe says. Every process built on that dependency needed to be refactored to use a different method, and figuring out the scope meant asking which of those processes were still needed at all after a decade in production.

The scale compounded the problem. Equity’s database ran roughly six times the size of a typical Dynamics 365 migration, built up over more than ten years of union-specific customization. To bring it down to something the cloud platform could manage efficiently, Equity’s team worked with Velosio to archive historical records into Microsoft Fabric and Data Lake, moving older data onto lower-cost storage without losing access to it.

For a project this size, Beebe credits Microsoft’s FastTrack program as indispensable. “Velosio recommended FastTrack to us, and I can’t imagine this project without that program,” he says. “Without FastTrack, that would have added months and tens of thousands of dollars to the project.”

Velosio helped Equity apply the FastTrack program to a highly customized environment. The program gave the team something a database migration rarely allows: a dress rehearsal. Equity ran four full practice migrations before the final cutover, each one timed and documented, so the team knew exactly how long systems would be down and could plan around it.

Rewriting a decade of code, with an assist from Copilot

Moving to the cloud also meant updating dozens of custom code libraries that handled functionality specific to Equity’s system. Beebe, who leads a small six-person IT team took on much of that work himself, with Microsoft Copilot doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

A go-live built around the union’s own calendar

By the time the final cutover arrived, the team had already rehearsed the hardest steps. Equity landed on schedule and under budget, while also working around one of the union’s biggest operational realities. Equity bills all 48,000 members their basic dues at once, a process the union couldn’t risk disrupting. “That was a major factor in consideration,” Beebe says, and the team scheduled the cutover to steer clear of the spring and fall billing windows entirely.

What’s different now

Five months after go-live, the code rewritten during the migration is measurably more efficient than what it replaced. Staff has a modern, responsive interface in place of the old system, which Beebe says has drawn consistent praise internally. And Equity is no longer constrained by what a self-hosted environment can support. Connections to Power Automate and third-party vendors that were previously out of reach are now easily available.

Virtual tables built on Microsoft Fabric turned out to be one of the migration’s biggest wins, an idea Velosio brought to the table partway through. A Broadway production like Wicked, for example, generates weekly dues records for dozens of working members, week after week, year after year. Multiply that across every production Equity tracks, and the underlying table had grown to millions of records, slowing the system’s ability to process them.

Now, records older than five years are archived into Fabric rather than kept active in the live system, cutting storage costs and restoring performance. Staff who need older records still get to them, through a virtual table that sits right next to the active data, one tab over. “They don’t really know the difference,” Beebe says.

A partnership built before the platform

What made the project work, according to Beebe, comes down to people more than technology. Having a team that knew the platform was a big advantage, he says, along with Velosio’s ability to pull in specialists when a problem called for one. But the constant across fifteen years has been continuity from Velosio’s side. “There’s a shorthand, not just in the work, but in understanding what the challenges are,” Beebe says. “They know us, they know our system.” Equity’s own IT team carried a real share of the work throughout, and that close collaboration between the two sides is what made the timeline and the outcome possible.

Equity spent over a decade developing a system that exactly matched how the union operates, then found a way to migrate it to the cloud without starting over or losing what worked. Being current now means Equity receives new features as Microsoft releases them, instead of waiting years between updates. “Always being on the newest platform feels really good,” Beebe says, “not only because of the benefits, but from the peace of mind.” With the platform up to date and the partnership with Velosio firmly in place, Equity is in a better position to keep improving the systems that support its members.