Supernova Award Category
Data to Decisions
The Problem
Focused on providing a customer-centric journey from product discovery to fulfillment, data analytics is essential to Fanatics customer service success for e-commerce and offline venues. Analytics allows for effective business planning (marketing, pricing, merchandizing) and a streamlined user experience. The firm has numerous daily product services and transactions, requiring an efficient solution to store, manage and analyze this data for greater operational efficiency and customer behavior insight.
The company had several homegrown, transactional and manufacturing applications which contain over 1000 tables and 100 terabytes of data. When employees queried a database in real-time while it was being accessed to address customer requests, too many demands would lock the application for placing orders, resulting in unavailability. Even if the data was replicated for analytical purposes into a new cluster, too many queries would cause it to lock and analysts couldn’t complete their work.
The Solution
The IT team selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud services and Attunity Replicate as its data migration solution. The combined technology provides low overhead and scalable data ingestion with the benefits of greater agility and productivity with the enablement of multiple data processes able to run in tandem. The team can now add new sources and tables easily.
The solution pulls data from more than five major internal systems and over 100 SQL Server tables. The data is shared with internal teams in micro-batches at 15-minute intervals or in real-time batches of 30-60 minute intervals. More recently, Attunity Replicate was moved from internal servers and into the AWS cloud to enable real-time data streams through Kafka.
By engaging with Attunity through the AWS Marketplace, Fanatics uses Attunity Replicate through the bring-your-own-license option. Fanatics was able to set up in minutes and load continuously into the new data lake with zero downtime.
The results
Fanatics moved huge volumes of data in real-time from SQL Server, Oracle and other traditional, e-commerce and back office systems to Amazon S3 seamlessly with Attunity Replicate. Now the BI team can easily consume and analyze the data using Hadoop, Spark and Amazon RedShift. Employees and customers can read the data simultaneously without any lockout issues. Additionally, as all the information is available in a single data lake rather than separate data islands, it allows internal analysts to join and combine data from various sources for greater insights.
The company is uncovering actionable, real-time insights into key customer behavior, purchasing patterns and sharing these findings with employees globally. Additionally, with the existing AWS and Attunity partnership, Fanatics consolidated its cloud services billing as all vendor fees were listed on a single invoice.
Metrics
With the Attunity solution, Fanatics is able to better analyze immense data volumes from disparate applications – including e-commerce, transactional and back office systems – in a single data lake on AWS. The beauty of the solution is that it produces individual business teams with the data they need and how they want it – matching data supply with data demands. For instance, as the data is consumed in real-time with Apache Kafka for streaming data, Fanatics avoids the heavy lifting of manually extracting data from diverse sources so customer teams may have immediate insight into purchase behaviors, promotional success and inventory. At the same time the BI team is provided batch reports every three hours for their more in-depth analysis and dashboards. This has transformed the Fanatics business model as each team is provided the flexibility to consume and use data for their needs rather than a one-size-fits-all mentality and matches the personalized customer experience that Fanatics is known for in the industry.
The Technology
Fanatics chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud solution provider of choice. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides highly-scalable storage and additional cloud services. For data migration and integration, Fanatics uses Attunity Replicate, an Amazon Partner Network provider.
Disruptive Factor
Fanatics stands apart from other retailers and sports merchandisers as it has fully embraced real-time streaming data analytics and modernized its data architecture to take full advantage of the power of data. The result is that the company is able to quickly identify customer trends and react to market changes to meet its mission of providing an outstanding customer life journey.
One example of how it disrupted the normal technology course is bringing together various IT teams into one for the ideal implementation and deployment of the Attunity solution. Previously database administrators who oversaw on-premises databases were charged with overseeing the Attunity solution. However, as the solution was moved to AWS, another faction of the IT group managed the solution. And in the middle of these two groups was the data platform team that was responsible for disseminating information to the analysts.
Fanatics brought all these teams together into one solutions group to ensure that the data table loading, and data table output was correctly configured for ideal results.
Shining Moment
We gained greater insight into data frequency requirements across our business teams. While real-time data streams are available, it can be disruptive for select teams to have such a frequency of data tables. This is a perfect example of making your data project and technology suit your needs and not the other way around.