LSports accelerates its growth with data, increasing analytics adoption by 15X

In our make-or-buy decision, we opted for Rivery as it enables us to focus on what matters most: leveraging our product and business data to deliver the best solutions to our customers.
– Itzik Polad, Chief Data Officer at LSports

LSports is a sports data provider specializing in real-time data, with high accuracy and high coverage.

When Itzik Polad joined LSports as VP of Data in March 2023 (now serving as Chief Data Officer), the organization was experiencing strong demand for its offerings.

The leadership then saw the opportunity to accelerate further by strengthening its data analytics framework and optimizing business processes with data. At the time, there were only 2 members at the data team, with very few internal users.

Since then, the company has expanded from ~150 to ~400 employees, with the data team growing to 10 engineers, serving 15X more users, including business, product and external customers users that are using data analytics intensively, enabling them to make data-driven decisions that supports the companies revenue growth and efficiency.

With the rapid growth the organization was experiencing, there arose a pressing need for a solid data infrastructure that users could depend on. Itzik and this team built a modern data architecture using Rivery, dbt Cloud, Snowflake, Tableau and Metaplane to transform Lsports data management capabilities.

The challenge: Paving the way for rapid growth

When Itzik joined, there was a basic AWS-Native data infrastructure in place with Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue, and Amazon QuickSight. These services were only utilized minimally by a few internal employees. Itzik recognized the urgency to implement technologies better suited to the organization’s use case and the vast volume of data they handled. 

The data team at LSports primarily deals with two types of data: (1) Traditional business data (sales, marketing, revenue analysis, churn, costs analysis, etc) and (2) their more complex products usage data. They faced the challenge of processing extra large volumes of data daily, which comes in from various databases and APIs with differing technologies and structures, not always designed to support efficient incremental extracts / streams for analytics.

The solution: Building a data stack from scratch

To tackle these challenges, the organization set out to build a modern data analytics platform using Rivery, dbt Cloud, Snowflake, Tableau and Metaplane.

The decision to go with Rivery was based on past positive experiences. While Itzik used Rivery at his previous organization on different use cases, he knew Rivery was flexible enough to handle LSports-specific use cases effectively.

“Having a scalable tool was key for us. Of course, we could develop everything ourselves, but the value of Rivery is that it’s not just for ingestion; it also provides orchestration, monitoring, and alerting. If the source API changes, Rivery handles that change for us, so we don’t have to worry about it. “ 

Here’s how they used Rivery

• Automated Data Ingestion: Rivery became the go-to no-code tool for ingesting both near real-time data via Change Data Capture (CDC) from various MySQL databases and batch data from various business applications.

• Cost-effective CDC: Using CDC was a game changer since their sources weren’t always holding proper timestamps and primary keys in the source databases. Rivery’s CDC allowed them to perform incremental loads, which significantly reduced replication costs and time on both the ETL and warehouse sides.

• End-to-end Orchestration and Monitoring: Once Rivery extracted and loaded data from MySQL databases and applications like Salesforce, Jira, HiBob, and Freshdesk, it then orchestrated dbt Cloud jobs and finally Tableau extract refreshes, ensuring that users always had access to the latest data.
• Reverse ETL processes syncing and operationalizing data between NetSuite, Salesforce, and Snowflake.

• Seamless Database Migration:When Itzik took over the organization, LSports stored their product and business data in Amazon Redshift, which was barely being utilized for analytics purposes. They utilized Rivery’s “Redshift as a source” integration to easily migrate data from Amazon Redshift to Snowflake.

The results: Driving business through data management

This new data infrastructure transformed the organization into a proactive, data-driven operation. Some key results included:

• Personalized Customer Offerings: The customer success team gained a clearer understanding of how customers were using the platform and their packages, enabling them to proactively reach out when customers approached their limits or when their usage declined. This approach helps to enhance customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase upselling opportunities. For example, they utilize Rivery to pull data from the LSports product database and Salesforce to compare credits with consumption. When an account exceeds 90% consumption, relevant team members receive alerts so they can proactively reach out to the customer before they exceed their plan limit.

• 400% YoY Increase in Analytics Adoption: Over the past year, the number of analytics consumers jumped by 400%, and the number of analytics sessions skyrocketed by 800%. They even began tracking how quickly people requested access to analytics during outages, which gave them insights into the critical role analytics played in the business. “Measuring the impact of data isn’t always a straightforward revenue calculation. To me, getting calls if some reports are unavailable was a great indication that the data they need is essential and they can’t do their job without the data.”

Moving Forward

LSports data team is constantly looking at new ways to deliver better data and are excited to explore more Rivery capabilities including Rivery’s new Copilot feature to connect to more sources via a simple prompt. The data team is also looking to transition to using Iceberg more frequently to boost compatibility and cut data storage costs. Rivery will continue to be a key player in all these future initiatives.

The strategic implementation of Rivery, along with dbt Cloud, Snowflake, Tableau and Metaplane, has transformed LSport’s approach to data analytics. Now, with the ability to ingest and analyze product data, the organization can make better informed decisions, enhance customer relationships, and foster a data-driven culture that supports ongoing growth.