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ZeniMax Creates Single View of Data With Pentaho

Case Study

Challenge: Deploy an integrated data model to unify silos, consolidate raw data into a data warehouse, and create a single view of disparate data.

Solution: Pentaho Data Integration provides the performance and framework to create a single view of the business.

Outcomes

  • Allows analysts to spend time studying gamer behavior instead of loading data.
  • Automates work that had previously been done manually or with Python scripts.
  • Reduces time needed to launch new products from months to weeks.

ZeniMax Media creates and publishes video games for consoles, PCs and mobile devices.

The Challenge: Create Unified View of Data to Support Rapid Development

The personal computer gaming industry is being driven by big data analytics. The $18.4 billion market has traditionally been an over-the-counter business, with DVDs boxed and sold at prices of up to $60 each.

Although many games are still packaged that way, the industry is beginning a massive move to the internet. This is reshaping nearly everything about the way gaming companies are doing business.

The challenge for game developers is to extend the storyline to keep players engaged. If developers can keep players engaged with new adventures, challenges and rewards, play can go on for years.

ZeniMax also faced IT challenges. For example, games generate a huge amount of data, as much as 5 terabytes per day for some of ZeniMax’s most popular titles. And the company’s historically siloed organizational structure gave developers little reason or incentive to share data. Each team selected its own metrics and made its own decisions. As a result, ZeniMax had data in MySQL, Postgres, JSON, XML and plain text, but there was no way to consolidate raw information into one database and present it in a form that could be digested by the business.

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We had a warehouse and a lake that were very disparate. How do we take that noise and transform it into something useful? Pentaho was the glue.
– Robert Walsh, Technical Director of Enterprise Business Intelligence, ZeniMax Media Inc.

The Solution: Pentaho Data Integration

Pentaho Data Integration provides the capabilities ZeniMax needed to unify its data environment and drive business initiatives. As a leader in the big data market, Pentaho understood how to consolidate disparate data types, and their integration and analytics solution provided the performance and framework to create a single view of the business.

The Outcome: Better Understanding of Gamer Behavior, Faster Time to Market

Since deploying Pentaho Data Integration, ZeniMax analysts are now able to spend their time digging into gamer behavior instead of loading data. Pentaho automated much of the work that had previously been done manually or with Python scripts, which has helped reduce the time needed to launch a new game from months to weeks.

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