A market leader for authentic, officially licensed sports merchandise, Fanatics offers a collection of gear from pro and college teams. A top 50 Internet Retailer Company, Fanatics offers officially licensed items via its Fanatics and FansEdge brands, as well as sports collectibles and memorabilia through the Fanatics Authentic brand. The company operates more than 300 online and offline stores, including the e-commerce business for all major professional sports leagues, major media brands, and more than 150 collegiate and professional team properties.
Fanatics has thousands of officially licensed items for sale in its online and offline store. In addition, more than 250 million people visit the company’s 300-plus websites every year. With a massive number of product searches and transactions taking place in a huge online warehouse, Fanatics constantly generates enormous amounts of data.
Because it wanted to enhance its business intelligence (BI) capabilities, Fanatics needed to find a more cost-effective and scalable way to store and analyze its data. To do that, the company decided to move its analytical data to the cloud for easier scalability. Fanatics also sought a seamless method of quickly migrating 100 terabytes of data, coming from five different applications, to the cloud.
Because Fanatics wanted a cloud solution provider with state-of-the-art capabilities, it chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud vendor. Fanatics uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to provide secure, durable, and highly scalable storage for its analytical data. Using the Amazon S3 web service interface, the Fanatics data science team can easily store and quickly retrieve any amount of data.
Fanatics is also utilizing additional cloud services for consuming and analyzing data, including Amazon Redshift, a petabyte-scale data warehouse for data analysis. The company uses the Apache Hadoop open-source big data framework and Apache Spark processing engine to power its big data solution.
To enable its data migration, Fanatics chose to work with Attunity, an Amazon Partner Network (APN) Technology Partner. Attunity created a cloud data lake for analytics based on Attunity CloudBeam, a solution that delivers simplified, high-performance data ingestion and migration from multiple data sources such as SQL Server to Amazon Redshift and Amazon S3. Attunity specifically helped Fanatics move its data from SQL Server into an Amazon S3 data repository. As a result, Fanatics can better store raw data in its native format, without needing to transform and store it in traditional column-based databases until it is needed for analysis.
Taking advantage of its new AWS data lake solution and Attunity CloudBeam, Fanatics is now able to analyze the huge volumes of data from its transactional, e-commerce, and back-office systems, and make this data available to its data scientists immediately for analytics.
As a result of its new BI capabilities, the organization will be able to more easily discover new ways to serve its customers. Using AWS and Attunity CloudBeam, Fanatics can now get actionable, real-time insights into key customer behavior and purchasing patterns — information that can be shared with employees globally.
Using AWS and Attunity CloudBeam, Fanatics quickly moved huge volumes of data in real time from SQL Server, Oracle, and other transactional back-office systems to Amazon S3. In fact, Fanatics set up the data lake in minutes and loaded data continuously, with zero system downtime.
Attunity CloudBeam gave Fanatics a way to securely transfer the data, using industry-standard SSL encryption. Relying on Attunity CloudBeam, Fanatics also avoided the need to manually extract the data and transfer it via scripting, staging, and importing.
Fanatics also met its need for a cost-effective solution. By engaging with Attunity through the AWS Marketplace, Fanatics was able to use an hourly “bring your own license” option to reduce licensing costs. Using Attunity's solution along with AWS gives Fanatics the ability to consolidate its billing for cloud services, because all vendor fees are clearly listed on a single invoice.
- A Technology Partner of the AWS Partner Network (APN), Attunity is a leading provider of data integration and data management software solutions that enable access, management, sharing, and distribution of data across heterogeneous enterprise platforms, organizations, and the cloud.
- For more information about how Attunity can help your company build and manage your AWS environment, see Attunity’s listing in the AWS Partner Directory.
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