Client
Ajax Amsterdam
Industry
Sports / Football
Date
January 2022
Dutch top soccer team AFC Ajax started their journey towards a data driven organization more than 7 years ago. This helps the club to excel and constantly improve the performance of not only the teams and individual players but also its operations and overall commercial success. The possibilities turned out to be limitless and Ajax has been pioneering with data analytics in many areas: ranging from Player Performance insights and fan-care to predicting & preventing early dropout of young talents. The sportive results on the field also lead to acceleration as a club and its commercial success.
Introduction
“The amount of data is growing exponential, and our databases and cloud environments are growing at an ever-increasing pace. We operate 100% cloud native with our digital platforms and data & analytics. We play better matches due to our continuous focus to improve, which correlates to more fans visiting the Ajax Fanshops and Webshop, resulting in a significant increase in transactions and activity on our digital platforms.” says Karim Chouaten, Data Lead at AFC Ajax.
“The CloudXcellence App and support team have been helping us since day 1 to unlock all relevant insights and recommendations regarding our cloud efficiency, to optimize our cloud costs & performance and keep them in top shape. Cloud Excellence enables us to monitor, understand and act on our cloud environment, so we can improve efficiency and operate our data cost efficient”.
The journey to transition into a data driven organization came with various challenges. “We are constantly looking for answers to questions that never have been asked before. We had a traditional complex and fragmented data estate which hampered the speed agility we needed to drive insights and innovation. CloudXcellence helped us to stay in control by providing grip on the entire estate”.
The challenge
Ajax became the national champion 2021-2022 in the Eredivisie competition. “This resulted in a bizarre workload increase in online requests for our online webshop and ticketing systems like we have never seen before. Thanks to the CloudXcellence early warnings we managed to keep the systems up and running, preventing running out of capacity. “It is easily assumed that everything auto-scales and heals by itself in the cloud. Due to the extra pair of CloudXcellence eyes we were enabled to keep servicing our fans 100%”.
“In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”
— Olivia Rhye, Product Manager
Cloud control with ease
“The CloudXcellence application has been enhanced over the years with many meaningful insights features we developed specific for Ajax” says Henk van der Valk, creator of CloudXcellence. “For example, we visualized hundreds of Azure Logic Apps and Data Factory workflows that used a particular external data provider as source. With these insights we helped shortening the time it took Ajax to shift hundreds of ETL packages from many months of manual labor to hours, simplifying the transition to a new ticketing provider”.
CloudXcellence helps to keep all the Ajax data in top shape, which gives Ajax the opportunity to focus on the analytics and creation of relevant insights with peace of mind about our overall Azure spend. CloudXcellence helps businesses to control their cloud. cost efficient.
