The Challenge: When Fast Growth Outpaces IT Infrastructure 

Global holding companies, private equity firms, and multinational corporations face a common infrastructure challenge: their portfolio companies and acquired businesses run on fragmented, redundant IT systems that prevent operational agility and cost efficiency across the organization. 

Penguin Solutions (formerly Smart Global Holdings), a $1.4 billion public company, faced this problem. Rapid growth through acquisitions left them with multiple enterprise Salesforce licenses, ERP systems, and critical data in silos across entities. The cost wasn't just redundant software spend – it was the inability to make unified decisions without centralized analytics across the business. 

Four Salesforce Instances, Zero Visibility

Each of Penguin Solutions’ acquisitions brought its own systems, data models, and people doing it their own way. Four separate Salesforce enterprise instances ran across the different entities. Multiple ERP systems, SAP and NetSuite, operated independently. Finance teams couldn’t consolidate reporting without manually gathering data from multiple sources. Sales leadership had no unified view of the pipeline across the business. 

With their Salesforce contract renewals coming up in a few months, Penguin saw an opportunity to consolidate systems to avoid redundant licensing costs and unlock sales visibility.

A CIO Who'd Seen It All Before, Until Turgon

Penguin Solutions’ CIO, Srini Tanikella, is a respected leader with three decades of experience leading strategic IT initiatives. He knew exactly how traditional integration projects like these unfold: time-consuming workshops and documentation, armies of consultants learning their systems, delivery timelines in months and years, and costs that balloon beyond initial estimates. 

When he learned about Turgon through one of their partners, he was skeptical. Turgon’s AI-native approach was radically different: AI agents working around the clock to map the entire data infrastructure in days, not months. Specialized senior engineers directing the AI agents and work, not junior consultants. And Turgon wasn’t just making claims. They demonstrated the platform in real-time to prove it works. 

The Solution: Rebuilding the Foundation for Unified Intelligence 

The data transformation project focused on consolidating the multiple Salesforce instances before the renewal deadline. Turgon’s AI agents went to work mapping data from two of the Salesforce instances, understanding how different entities structured their data, normalizing and merging the disparate data, and resolving semantic mismatches automatically. 

In just three days, Turgon’s agents created a data dictionary across the two systems and turned two Salesforce instances into one unified enterprise data model flowing into Snowflake’s data lake. 

With the right data foundation in place, Penguin Solutions was able to easily connect ThoughtSpot’s modern analytics tools with real-time dashboards, giving leadership visibility into sales performance, pipeline health, and customer overlap across the portfolio. They also now had a single, trusted forecast model for supply chain management. 

Three weeks from project kickoff to unified dashboards in full production, the executive team could confidently make decisions based on complete, current information across their portfolio. The SVP of Sales was impressed by the lack of disruption to his teams while this infrastructure change was taking place. No disrupted deals. No system downtime. No frantic IT calls. Turgon delivered a major data migration with zero negative operational impact.

From Proof of Concept to Full Transformation 

The next phase is underway to consolidate the remaining Salesforce instances to create a truly unified customer management and forecasting system across the entire organization. When complete, Penguin Solutions will decommission redundant licenses and capture millions in annual savings, while gaining the operational agility that fragmented systems had prevented for years.

But the strategic value extends far beyond the reduced licensing costs. Penguin Solutions now has institutional knowledge embedded in the infrastructure itself through the semantic models, data relationships, and integration patterns, all documented and accessible through Turgon's living infrastructure approach. When the next acquisition happens, they can model integration complexity before the deal closes and execute in weeks, not years.

Penguin Solutions has transformed one of its greatest operational liabilities of rapid acquisition integration, into a repeatable competitive advantage. To learn more about how Turgon can help you lead your IT transformation, contact us.