"Creating the type of data lake we have on-premises would have been not only very difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, but also I would have needed to hire a lot more people with the right big data skills," said Eric Anderson, executive director of data for Beachbody, LLC. “Using Talend and AWS, we were able to easily ingest all our data into the cloud in less than six months. Our estimates indicated doing this type of project on-premises would have taken over a year. Additionally, big data technologies are evolving so quickly that keeping pace with software updates would have been a challenge. But with Talend and AWS, we have the agility required to ensure our IT environment is up-to-speed at all times.”
When you’re in a competitive industry, it’s imperative for employees to have timely access to enterprise data to make informed decisions. Beachbody was running a conventional on-premises Oracle data warehouse to store its corporate information, but knew it needed more business agility and flexibility. Eric Anderson and his team decided to bulk up the company’s analytics architecture by adding a Hadoop-based data lake on AWS. Now, the company’s centralized analytics team has near-real-time access to essential information concerning its customers, coaches, website usage, and more.
Using Talend Data Integration, Beachbody ingests all incoming data into a Hadoop Distributed File System for initial processing, which is then stored in Amazon S3. Some highly processed data is also moved into Amazon Redshift to get faster performance on analytical queries. The AWS data lake can then be accessed via self-service analytics tools by Beachbody employees, so they can evaluate website activity, logs from Beachbody on-demand (the company's workout-video streaming service), call-center records and external data on customer acquisition and spending, as well as sales and financial transaction data.
“Beachbody is an excellent example of the flexibility and data agility companies can experience by moving to the cloud with Talend,” said Ashley Stirrup, CMO, Talend. “Our tight integration with AWS solutions makes it easy for thousands of data sources to be made available using any AWS platform, allowing our joint customers to deploy big data projects dramatically faster, with far less operational support, so they can speed time-to-value.”
