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Embed Tranforms the Business of Fun with Amazon Redshift
Embed, a Singapore-based subsidiary of Helix Leisure, offers cashless contactless business management systems and solutions for the amusement, entertainment, and leisure industries. With the integrated software platform TOOLKIT, Embed helps family entertainment center (FEC) business owners to deliver a seamless guest experience while increasing profitability and lowering costs. End-users can easily reload their virtual game cards anytime, anywhere via Embed’s award-winning Mobile Wallet, the only Apple iOS and Google Android certified solution in the industry, making the Embed virtual game card the only non-finance, banking, or loyalty card that sits in the consumers’ mobile wallet. This virtual game card is integrated with Embed’s TOOLKIT business management solutions, including point-of-sales and cashless payment reporting.
Over 1,000 FEC business owners around the world use Embed’s platform for centralized visibility and control over business data and analytics across their entire operation. The data insights are critical in helping businesses better understand users’ end-to-end behavior and enhance the customer journey. As needs for quicker and more advanced reporting functions grow, Embed seeks to achieve data aggregation at regional and global levels in near-real-time.
However, its previous data infrastructure was unable to support these growing needs. The company was using a 20-year-old software stack that manually aggregated data from disparate on-premises databases for over 3,000 installations worldwide. Embed wanted its data reporting capabilities to be more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective.
“Operationally, it is a huge win for us. AWS provided reliable and generous support for our migration to Amazon Redshift, which significantly boosted the reliability and agility of our IT architecture. Through improving bandwith exponentially, it’s given our team more time now to innovate new solutions. Most of all, the move to a multi-tenant SaaS model helped us manage and monitor multiple databases for numerous customers easily and effectively, all in one place.”
Andy Welsh
Chief Technology Officer at Embed
From Single-tenant to Multi-tenant Architecture
By using
Amazon Redshift, a cloud data warehouse, Embed can now consolidate customer data from across 3,000+ databases into a single data cluster. This allows the company to pivot from a single-tenant model to a multi-tenant architecture, improving data management efficiency, cost efficiency and scalability, while gaining advanced cross-tenant analytics capabilities for better reporting.
The company can quickly centralize and aggregate globally dispersed customer data in a single query, saving hours of manual work. Customers can also access their end-of-day reports more quickly, as the time taken to synchronize and ingest data has been reduced from 3 hours to under 20 minutes.
Instead of taking up to a week to roll out new updates to each database individually, Embed now takes 10 minutes to update all its databases. The multi-tenant SaaS architecture has helped the company cut operating costs by 75 percent and achieve 10 times savings on infrastructure spend.
Andy Welsh, chief technology officer at Embed, says, “Operationally, it is a huge win for us. AWS provided reliable and generous support for our migration to Amazon Redshift, which significantly boosted the reliability and agility of our IT architecture. Through improving bandwidth exponentially, it’s given our team more time now to innovate new solutions. Most of all, the move to a multi-tenant SaaS model helped us manage and monitor multiple databases for numerous customers easily and effectively, all in one place.”
“The ability to get a holistic view of guest activities and actions across venues at vastly improved speeds - coupled with our Mobile Wallet - means that our clients have significant advantages in tailoring amazing marketing experiences to increase footfall and repeat visits. The impact of these tools are transformative and will consistently make our customers stand out against the rest of the entertainment space. Equipping our customers with the ability to reach out more efficiently to their guests to delight them time and time again will future-proof their business and transform their FEC into the go-to destination for fun,” Welsh continues.
Accelerating Embed’s SaaS Transition Journey
AWS worked with Embed to migrate its databases from
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to Amazon Redshift for faster data loading, transformation, and analysis at scale. The implementation took 4 months and was completed with zero disruption.
The company uses
Amazon Lambda functions,
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues, and a data lake built on
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), to easily ingest customer data into the Amazon Redshift data warehouse.
“Because our data architecture was already on the AWS Cloud, we could easily and quickly migrate our databases and incorporate additional AWS services. AWS helped validate our ideas on how to optimize our data input and cluster size on Amazon Redshift. This saved us time and effort in finding the most suitable setup,” says Artem Musienko, vice president of engineering at Embed.
Blazing New Trails & Transforming the Business of Fun
After successfully upgrading REPORTS, its smart reporting tool, Embed is exploring more ways to use its data to improve data transparency and analytics that strengthen family entertainment customer operations. To help FEC business owners meet the fast-evolving expectations of end-users, Embed is developing a data discrepancy analysis tool and revamping APIs to obtain more timely and accurate business data insights.
"Embed is our chosen and exclusive point-of-sale, data, and reporting partner. Given the pace technology changes, working with an industry leader who is constantly pushing boundaries and pioneering new technology, specifically for the family entertainment industry, is invaluable. The decision was made even easier knowing that Embed partners with a household name like AWS. Embed's cloud reporting solution backed by AWS technology allows us to get the data we need when we need it,” shared Mark Souba, chief development officer at Pizza Ranch, Inc.
The company is also ramping up its digitalization efforts with plans to migrate more traditional on-premise operations to the cloud and build up in-house expertise to support its growing cloud-based architecture.
“No one does Big Data and innovates at the same pace like AWS. We aim to transform the business of fun; it’s very much a go-big-or-go-home spirit because ‘we’ve not come this far to only come this far.’ Our vision of the FEC of the future is so far reaching that our strong partnership with industry titans give us a competitive edge that no one else comes close to. It also gives our clients comfort and plays a role in their selection,” shares Renee Welsh, chief executive officer at Embed.
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About Embed
Embed, a Singapore-based subsidiary of Helix Leisure, is the worldwide leader of cashless business management systems and solutions for the amusement, entertainment, and leisure industries. Its software platform helps business owners in the family entertainment center (FEC) sector to deliver a superior guest experience while increasing profitability and lowering costs via cashless business management solutions, including integrated point-of-sales and cashless payment business reporting.
Benefits
- Reduced time taken to sync up and digest data from 3 hours to under 20 minutes
- Customers can now access their end-of-day reports in near-real-time, compared to a 45-minute time lag
- Resolved data import issues
- Cut operating costs by 75-percent
- 10 times savings on infrastructural spend with a scalable setup that can meet changing business needs
- Ability to aggregate customer data from different regions and countries in a single query, compared to hours of manual data aggregation
AWS Services Used
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes, using AWS-designed hardware and ML to deliver the best price performance at any scale.
Amazon Lambda
AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. You can trigger Lambda from over 200 AWS services and software as a service (SaaS) applications, and only pay for what you use.
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
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