TechNova's Multi-Platform Data Model Modernization

TechNova is a SaaS company that has grown from a single product to a suite of five products over eight years, each developed by a separate team with its own database design. The company serves 10,000 business customers and processes 2 million transactions daily. Each product has its own customer, account, and billing data models with no shared standards. The company plans to launch a unified customer portal that provides a single view across all products, but the data modeling inconsistencies make this extremely difficult. Customer entities are modeled differently across products: one uses a flat structure, another uses a normalized third-normal-form design, and a third uses a document-based NoSQL model. The same customer attribute (company size) is stored as a free-text field in one system, an enum in another, and a numeric range in a third. The CTO wants to establish a unified enterprise data model without disrupting the five existing product databases that serve production customers. The integration project has a 12-month timeline and a budget that cannot support rewriting all five database schemas.