Betclic: Modernizing Legacy OLAP For Cloud-First Data Analytics

Betclic — a European online gambling company — provides millions of players with services for sport and horse-racing betting, poker, and other casino games. The company’s primary goal is to offer accessible, high-quality products and games to its customers. Central to this mission is leveraging its massive amounts of data to improve the customer experience and manage the risks associated with the gambling industry.

As the Betclic data team worked to keep pace with growth and modernize their analytics stack, they needed to overcome the limitations of their SQL Server Analysis Service (SSAS) implementation. By implementing AtScale, Betclic has been able to move away from SSAS while delivering a high performance analytics experience to users and moving to a cloud-first data management approach.

Challenge

Legacy SSAS solution lacks scalability for data-driven business approach

Betclic’s legacy solution using on-premises SSAS cubes wasn’t scalable in the long term. For example, Betclic had one SSAS cube with two years of customer data and transactions that took three to four hours to refresh before it was analytics-ready for the finance team. This legacy SSAS solution was also one of the last remaining on-premise workloads because Betclic wasn’t able to replicate its functionality in the cloud.

As Betclic faced these challenges with its legacy data approach, the company also recognized the need to improve scalability before the World Cup, European Championship, and other key sporting events started back up after the pandemic. The company needed a way to modernize its data analytics and seamlessly transition to a cloud-first approach to delivering online analytical processing (OLAP) solutions to its users.

Solution

AtScale enables high-performance analytics with live access to data on Snowflake

As part of Betclic’s migration to a cloud-first approach, the company used AtScale to more easily connect Excel and Tableau to Snowflake data. In fact, all Excel-based analyses have now been migrated to AtScale, including the largest and most complex workbooks. Excel users can work with Snowflake data using a similar user experience to SSAS by leveraging AtScale.

After implementing AtScale, business users now have access to 15 years worth of data on Snowflake, rather than being limited to a single year stored in the legacy cube. In addition, users have the ability to drill down to a granular level, slice and dice the data, and perform other advanced analytics against live Snowflake data. Even sophisticated queries on large datasets that weren’t possible with the legacy approach now take just a few minutes with AtScale.

Results

Cloud-first data analytics streamlines business decisions

By applying AtScale’s semantic layer, Betclic’s business teams can now access Snowflake data from the tool of their choice, whether it’s Excel or Tableau. Faster and easier access to granular data enables business users to make better decisions when it comes to reducing risk exposure and turns business analysts into citizen data scientists.

Moreover, decommissioning the legacy SSAS cubes has enabled Betclic to fully transition to a cloud-first analytics approach and eliminate its on-premise infrastructure costs. With AtScale’s help, Betclic has been able to modernize its data analytics architecture to facilitate a data-driven business approach.