A queryable, compliance-grade qad cloud archive on AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI. Parquet at pennies per GB-month, SQL/REST/Parquet access, role-based security with sensitive-field masking. Eliminates Progress OpenEdge, .NET UI, and QXtend infrastructure — saves $300K–$900K/year.
Progress OpenEdge backups, tape archives, cold storage dumps, lights-on MFG/PRO instances — none of them serve manufacturing consumers. The qad cloud archive does.
Traditional QAD archival meant one of two bad options. Option A: keep a 'lights-on' QAD instance alive on Progress OpenEdge at $300K–$900K/year for licenses, .NET UI app tier, QXtend middleware, and 1–3 Progress administrators — purely so an auditor or OEM customer might query it twice a year. Option B: take OpenEdge backups to cold storage that no one can actually query without a multi-week restore project requiring increasingly scarce Progress 4GL skills. Both options satisfy the regulatory 'retain the data' requirement on paper while failing the 'access the data' requirement in practice — and both bleed cash every month.
The qad cloud archive solves both. Data lives in commodity cloud object storage as compressed columnar Parquet — typically 6–12x smaller than the source Progress OpenEdge database, costing a few thousand dollars per year for multi-TB datasets. Query interfaces (SQL, REST, direct Parquet) serve OEM customers, FDA inspectors, finance auditors, and quality engineers without any Progress OpenEdge restore step. Pre-materialised datasets and genealogy graphs serve the highest-frequency manufacturing queries — PPAP traceability, batch records, trial balances — in sub-second.
The qad cloud archive is also forward-compatible. The archive lives in your cloud account, in your storage, accessible to whichever BI and audit tools your organisation standardises on. As your tooling evolves over the 15–30 year retention window, the qad cloud archive stays accessible — no Progress OpenEdge skills required, no QAD .NET UI infrastructure required, no QXtend middleware to maintain.
Three deployment patterns covering every manufacturing governance and data-residency requirement we've seen — automotive, life sciences, defense, food, industrial.
Fastest deployment (1–2 weeks), lowest operational burden. qad cloud archive hosted in Syntra cloud accounts in customer's preferred region. SOC 2 Type II + ISO 27001. Suitable for non-regulated industrial and consumer products manufacturers.
Most common pattern. Data and storage in customer's own AWS/Azure/GCP/OCI account with customer-managed keys. Syntra deploys and operates the query layer via remote control plane. Suitable for most life sciences, automotive, and food manufacturers.
Full self-hosted. Customer's infrastructure, customer's operations team. Syntra provides software, deployment automation, and L3 support. Standard for defense suppliers under ITAR/DFARS with strict no-vendor-access policies.
AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, OCI Government. FedRAMP-aligned qad cloud archive for defense suppliers handling ITAR-controlled technical data who cannot use commercial public cloud regions.
Archive data in one cloud (e.g. OCI for Oracle commercial alignment), query via another (e.g. Snowflake on AWS for analytics alignment). For multinational manufacturers with cross-cloud governance and BI-tool standards.
Fully disconnected qad cloud archive for defense and classified manufacturing. Air-gapped install, periodic delta updates via approved transfer mechanism, on-premises object storage support.
From scoping to first OEM customer query. Most qad cloud archive deployments complete in 6–10 weeks.
Cloud account selection (AWS/Azure/GCP/OCI), object storage buckets provisioned, encryption keys generated (KMS or CMK), network paths configured (VPC endpoints, Private Link). IdP integration scoped for SAML/OIDC. ITAR/DFARS segmentation defined for defense customers.
Full pt_mstr / cm_mstr / vd_mstr / wo_mstr / wod_det / so_mstr / po_mstr / gl_hist / tr_hist extract from source Progress OpenEdge via native JDBC. Parquet conversion with partition design (year/domain/site/entity), upload to object storage. Hash signatures captured. Manifest files written for auditability.
.p file inventory, QXtend interface catalogue, QAD Reporting Framework reports, .NET UI customisations, trigger registry preserved alongside data. 'QAD system encyclopaedia' document drafted — captures business logic encoded in customisations for future audit reference.
SQL/REST/Parquet endpoints provisioned. Role-based security configured per consumer profile (OEM auditor, FDA inspector, finance auditor, internal quality, ITAR-cleared engineer). Sensitive-field masking rules applied. Audit-log pipeline to SIEM configured.
Lot-genealogy graph materialised from wo_mstr + wod_det + tr_hist for instant PPAP traceback. Trial balance per period per entity, AP aging per supplier, supplier scorecards, OEE rollups, FSMA one-up/one-back chains — all pre-computed for instant response.
OEM, FDA, audit, finance, and quality consumer testing against qad cloud archive vs live QAD. Documentation delivered. Consumer training. QAD moves to read-only or decommissioned. The qad cloud archive is now system of record for the retention horizon.
Six capabilities that turn 'data preserved' into 'manufacturing data useful' — without any Progress OpenEdge dependency.
Tableau, Power BI, OTBI, Qlik connect via standard JDBC/ODBC to query qad cloud archive data instantly. No 'restore OpenEdge backup, install QAD .NET UI, extract data via .p script' workflow.
OEM customers run their own genealogy queries against the archive's pre-materialised PPAP graph with sensitive supplier pricing masked. Sub-second response, full PPAP Element 14 export, every query logged.
Archived historical wod_det and tr_hist feeds ML models for yield prediction, scrap reduction, supplier-quality scoring, and predictive maintenance — accessible from Spark, Databricks, SageMaker, Vertex AI directly via Parquet.
Join pre-migration QAD archive with post-migration Fusion Manufacturing Cloud live data in a single Snowflake/BigQuery query. 15-year OEE and yield trends span both systems seamlessly.
Targeted preservation, point-in-time freezing, defensible deletion — all native to the qad cloud archive's immutable-versioning storage layer. Critical for product-liability defence in automotive and pharma.
Record-level redaction with audit trail. Erasure requests fulfilled programmatically, with cryptographic proof of permanent removal — meeting EU manufacturers' employee and consumer data obligations.
The Syntra QAD cloud archive is a queryable, compliance-grade store of QAD Adaptive ERP, QAD .NET UI, and MFG/PRO data — every key table (pt_mstr, cm_mstr, vd_mstr, wo_mstr, wod_det, so_mstr, gl_hist, tr_hist), every QAD Reporting Framework definition, every QXtend interface, every .p file customisation — held in cloud object storage with a managed query interface. It replaces the legacy pattern of keeping a 'lights-on' QAD instance on Progress OpenEdge alive for compliance access. The qad cloud archive runs on commodity object storage (AWS S3, Azure Blob, GCS, OCI Object Storage) at pennies per GB-month, exposes SQL/REST/Parquet interfaces, applies role-based security with sensitive-field masking, logs every access for immutable audit evidence, and supports retention horizons from 5 years (FSMA) to 30 years (pharma 21 CFR Part 11).
Progress OpenEdge backups are restore-only — to use them, you have to spin up Progress OpenEdge infrastructure, restore the database, recompile any .p files needed, restart the QAD .NET UI app server, and hire or contract a Progress administrator who still remembers how. That's a multi-week operation that requires increasingly scarce Progress 4GL and OpenEdge skills, plus the full Progress OpenEdge license cost. The qad cloud archive is query-ready continuously: an auditor opens a SQL client and runs SELECT in 30 seconds. The archive preserves the same schema and data as the source MFG/PRO/Adaptive ERP database, plus customisation catalogue and report definitions, but eliminates Progress OpenEdge, .NET UI, and QXtend infrastructure dependencies entirely. Cloud archives also include columnar compression (Parquet typically 6–12x smaller than the source OpenEdge database) and elastic query compute — typically 10–100x faster than restored backups for analytical queries.
All major hyperscalers: AWS (S3 storage, Athena query, optional Glue catalog), Azure (Blob Storage, Synapse Serverless SQL, optional Purview catalog), GCP (Cloud Storage, BigQuery external tables), OCI (Object Storage, Autonomous Database, Analytics Cloud). Customer-managed encryption keys (CMK) supported on all platforms. Multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments supported — for example, qad cloud archive data in OCI Object Storage but query via Snowflake — for manufacturers with cross-cloud governance requirements. Air-gapped and government-cloud deployments (AWS GovCloud, Azure Government) supported for defense suppliers under ITAR/DFARS who cannot host controlled technical data in commercial public cloud.
Dramatically smaller. Typical mid-size QAD databases run 100GB–2TB on Progress OpenEdge. After Parquet compression, qad cloud archives typically land at 15–250GB. At standard cloud object storage pricing ($0.02–$0.025/GB-month warm tier), that's $4–$75/month, $50–$900/year for storage. Even multi-TB enterprise QAD archives rarely exceed $5K/year in storage. Query compute is the larger variable cost — typically $150–$1,500/month depending on query volume, with most customers in the $400–$900/month range. Total qad cloud archive cost: $5K–$15K/year vs $300K–$900K/year for keeping live QAD on Progress OpenEdge plus the .NET UI app tier, QXtend middleware, and 1–3 Progress administrators. Savings compound across the typical 15-year retention window.
Yes. The archive's columnar Parquet storage plus partition pruning handles billion-row tables natively. Largest QAD archives in production: 2.6B-row wod_det (work-order detail, full 22-year history for a global automotive Tier-1 across 18 plants), 1.4B-row gl_hist (15 years of GL detail across a multi-domain pharma), 800M-row tr_hist (inventory transaction history for a multi-site industrial manufacturer). Typical query response: 2–5 seconds for single-period single-entity queries, 10–30 seconds for multi-year aggregations, with year-end audit datasets and PPAP genealogy graphs pre-materialised for instant response. The qad cloud archive scales linearly with object storage — no Progress OpenEdge capacity planning required.
The Syntra extractor handles Progress OpenEdge specifics natively — Progress decimals, denormalised arrays, BLOBs, OpenEdge NULL semantics — and preserves them losslessly through Parquet conversion. The QAD .NET UI customisation layer (custom screens, validation logic, navigation customisations) is inventoried and preserved as metadata in the archive's customisation catalogue alongside the .p file inventory, QXtend interface catalogue, and QAD Reporting Framework report library. So the archive captures not just the data but the system context — what custom logic was applied to that data at the time it was written — which is essential for audit defence and for any future re-implementation discussion.
Defense in depth, tuned to manufacturing compliance. Storage: encryption at rest with KMS-managed keys (customer-managed keys mandatory for ITAR/DFARS), bucket-level access control, immutable object versioning for tamper-evidence. Network: TLS 1.3 for all access, private endpoints (VPC endpoints / Private Link) for in-cloud access, IP allowlist for OEM/regulator access. Identity: role-based access tied to enterprise IdP via SAML/OIDC, MFA-required for sensitive roles, just-in-time elevation for ITAR-controlled item unmask. Audit: every query logged with user, timestamp, query text, rows returned, fields touched — log itself stored immutably and exported to SIEM. Compliance: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, FDA 21 CFR Part 11 alignment, ITAR-controlled segmentation, DFARS-aligned access controls.
Yes — and this is the standard deployment for ITAR/DFARS defense suppliers and for European life sciences manufacturers with GDPR data-residency requirements. Three deployment options: (1) Syntra-managed SaaS — fastest to deploy, lowest operational overhead, suitable for non-regulated industrial customers. (2) Customer-cloud, Syntra-operated — data and storage stay in customer infrastructure with CMK, Syntra deploys and operates the query layer remotely (most common pattern). (3) Customer-hosted, customer-operated — full self-hosted in customer infrastructure, Syntra provides software and L3 support; standard for defense suppliers with no-vendor-access policies. All three options are functionally identical from a consumer perspective and all eliminate the Progress OpenEdge dependency.
30-minute call. Walk through your cloud preference, regulatory profile (IATF 16949 / FDA Part 11 / ITAR / FSMA), and retention horizon — leave with a qad cloud archive deployment plan and a year-1 savings number versus your current Progress OpenEdge spend.