Our client is a major developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of video games and has grown over the years via growth and acquisitions which resulted in multiple sources systems and complex data scenarios. They are a leader in the market with its move towards digital downloadable products and to a direct to consumer sales channel. The Digital business is growing at a healthy rate and is expected to overtake the packaged goods business in about 4-5 years. All these business drivers resulted in the need of developing a business intelligence (BI) solution that would help our client’s executives understand and manage their direct to customer business more effectively. As with other companies, our client had several challenges:

• Lack of enterprise wide metrics to track business performance across different labels and regions.
• Lack of a reporting system that provided a single version of the truth.
• Lack of a solution that facilitated ease of use along with fast response time to the business questions asked.

Our client recognized the challenges and wanted to leverage their investments in both Teradata and MicroStrategy platforms to support the high analytical needs of their business customers. HARKEN DATA solution approach was to help them with implementing a solution that would provide the following benefits:

• Provide an Executive and Operational reporting environment that enabled and empowered end-users with a powerful tool for answering ad-hoc business questions on the fly with a fast response time.
• Create a security model that restricts data access to users based on the client’s internal business model.
• Provide a framework to gather and prioritize business requirements.
• Architect and design a solution that is scalable to extend the reporting for their digital business.

HARKEN DATA’s approach to the solution was to implement a multiple phased approach:

Business Analysis Phase

Our client’s enterprise is comprised of studios/Labels with different business models which uses different metrics to monitor their business. Corporate management wanted enterprise wide metrics like ARPU, ARPPU and Paying User conversion percentage to track business performance.

HARKEN DATA helped with an extensive analysis phase by conducting information sessions and interviews with key business stakeholders within the different studios/Labels and functional departments. HARKEN DATA provided with a framework for capturing the requirements in an organized fashion. This phase helped to collate the business needs from the different stakeholders and then a prioritization exercise was done to identify the key metrics and functionality requirements for the solution.

System Analysis Phase

In this phase HARKEN DATA evaluated the existing MicroStrategy and Teradata architecture including the ETL loading strategies.

Recommendations were given on what architectural changes need to be done to utilize the various features of both MicroStrategy and Teradata’s such as AJIs.

Architecture and Delivery Phase

HARKEN DATA led the delivery of the solution and provided expertise in the various SDLC aspects including logical modeling, ETL architecture, BI architecture and project management. A business friendly semantic model was designed and implemented over the Teradata data warehouse which extensively used Teradata’s performance functions like AJIs that resulted in report retrieval times exceeding user expectations.

In addition, the Executive dashboard and ad-hoc reporting solution were built on top of the semantic layer to provide extremely fast response time. The solution also enabled the business to answer business questions like active users across the organization which could not have been answered before the solution was implemented.

HARKEN DATA was able to implement this solution utilizing both on-shore and off-shore resources. We established a communication and project management processes to work effectively with the offshore team, and providing a higher ROI.