projects

Scalable processing and analysis of scarab sports’ data

tl;dr

  • Scalable and future-proof data warehousing system.
  • Automated analysis and insights into players’ performance.
  • Extremely fast responses to clubs’ statistical queries.
  • Parallel computations and analysis of training sessions.
  • An intuitive way for adding new analysis.

about scarab sports

Scarab Sports is a company located in Ghent that is building a new dimension in football talent development. They invented and built the PL8, which is a hardware device being used for football practice. Its purpose is to measure, analyze and boost football players' technical and cognitive skills.

the challenges

a lot of data

We already developed the mobile and web application for Scarab Sports in close collaboration with Comate, who designed the PL8-hardware itself. These PL8s gather enormous amounts of data from a plethora of sensors. This data is sent to the mobile application with a custom communication protocol that was developed together with Comate.

The mobile application transfers this raw data to the cloud for further storage. To gain useful insights from this data, however, significant processing power is needed. There should be a way for efficient extraction of insights from the data, assuring low response times whenever clubs are analyzing player results. Furthermore, all these intensive computations should be done in a cost-efficient manner to keep the computation costs for Scarab Sports as low as possible.

aim for the future

Scarab Sports is only standing at the beginning of its bright and successful future. As we proclaim to always keep the future in mind while developing products, part of the challenge is to prepare their product for all their future ideas and challenges. For this reason, we developed and introduced our future-scoping workshop. The goals during a future-scoping workshop are the following:

  • Gain insights into the vision and goals of the company’s/product’s future;
  • Guide the customer in brainstorming future ideas for their product.

Thanks to these insights, we’re able to analyze all implications these updates could have on the system and take these into account during research and design. This way we can assure the future-proofness of Scarab Sports’ product.

During the future-scoping workshop, we were guided toward seeing the bigger picture. We discovered how useful it can be to zoom out, reflect upon our future ideas, and gain new insights which we could test with the market. Matthias Seghers (CTO Scarab Sports)

the solution

Over the course of eight weeks, we researched, designed, and built a data warehousing solution perfectly tailored to Scarab Sports’ needs and requirements.

The requirements of the solution were to:

  • Allow to easily add, update and remove data analysis scripts;
  • Guarantee low response times in the analysis web platform;
  • Have automatic horizontal scaling of the data warehouse whenever the server load becomes too big;
  • Perfectly plug into Scarab Sports’ current products and storage systems.

Because of our efficient research and design work, we were able to build a solution that checks off all of the above requirements. Thanks to our weekly standups we assured a clear and transparent communication line with Scarab Sports. This way we made sure that Scarab Sports knew exactly what we were doing and that we stayed within the outlined price range.

Thanks to the frequent stand-ups after every sprint, I was always perfectly aware of the status of the project, the hordes, the decisions made… Due to their clear and transparent communication, I felt completely in control, and I was able to make faster adjustments in case this would be necessary. Matthias Seghers (CTO Scarab Sports)

Curious how we can help you scale your company and prepare you for tomorrow? Let’s get in touch!