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Customer Success

AEG Worldwide

AEG Worldwide uses Pythian Enterprise Data Platform to deliver a frictionless fan experience–from buying tickets to predicting concession purchases.

AEG needed a complete view of their customers, from what events they attended and with how many people, to what they ate and did at the events. The data to create this integrated view was locked in multiple silos. Enter Pythian. 

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Overview

Industries

Entertainment

AEG is a leader in the live entertainment industry, with a global network of venues, sports franchises, music brands, integrated entertainment districts, and ticketing platforms. Every year, AEG promotes 32,000 shows and live events at hundreds of AEG-affiliated venues, entertaining more than 100 million guests. AEG CIO Bill Martin had a vision for connecting with customers and enhancing the fan experience, which would in turn boost AEG’s brand and bottom line. AEG had a massive opportunity to use big data to communicate with clients in a more personalized and timely way, fundamentally changing the customer’s experience for the better at AEG events and venues. Martin identified simple but important changes that could be made, such as simplifying the parking experience, helping people find their seats quickly, and ultimately even engaging in real-time with the event itself.  

To gain the insights needed to turn this vision into reality, AEG chose Pythian's Enterprise Data Platform. 

 

 What we did
  • Worked with AEG and Microsoft to implement a cloud-native customer data platform, a big data and analytics solution 
    • Enterprise Data Platform brought millions of rows of data from eight different data sources in more than two dozen data formats together into a data lake (capture), then cleaned and integrated the data to create an organized and incredibly rich view of the AEG customer base (curation) 
    • This data was then made available in Azure SQL Data Warehouse to business analysts who used Power BI and other tools to create marketing programs that could be completely personalized (consumption) 
  • Tailored the Enterprise Data Platform solution to AEG’s specific needs, using Azure Blob Storage as the data lake, some open-source tools for curation, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse for consumption 
 

Technologies used

 
  • Capture (Ingestion and Storage Layers) 
  • Azure Key Vault (to store encryption/decryption keys for sensitive data) 
  • Apache NiFi 
  • Azure Blob Storage 
  • Azure VMs 
  • Encryption Server Curation (Processing Layer) 
  • Apache Spark (running on Azure VMs) 
  • Apache Airflow (tasks-scheduling and orchestration) 
  • Data Access Layer 
  • Azure SQL Data Warehouse via Power BI and Tableau 
  • Azure Blob storage via Azure ML 
 

Key Outcomes

With 100 million guests and more than 32,000 live events every year, we were swimming in data. Pythian has played a key role in helping us manage and make use of this trove. Their (EDP) on Azure empowers us to, among other things, cut costs, integrate our ticketing and sales data, and better target our marketing efforts. Thanks to Pythian and Azure, we finally have the big data partners we need to support our growth.

– Richard Battersby, Vice President, Business Intelligence & Digital Analytics, AEG Worldwide

 

New capability to develop preference profiles

and identify potential ticket buyers using data from disparate sources

Ability to identify opportunities to promote

 events to clients based on past purchases in an intelligent and timely way  

Improved customer experience 

with data lake capabilities that enable data scientists to explore and develop predictive models 

Increased revenues 

for tickets and concession purchases  

Explore Microsoft Azure 

No matter your business, no matter the challenge: Pythian’s solutions drive results.