The Company
Founded in 2019 and Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, Innplay Labs has a talent for finding the “next cool thing” and bringing that experience to their users through games.
Every decision at Innplay is based on data; in fact, they consider themselves every bit as much a data company as a gaming company. In order to realize their goal of taking over the world of mobile entertainment, they needed a platform that would scale with the business as it grows.
The company combines their customer data with cutting-edge technology to bring their users the ultimate gaming experience, and they rely on Panoply to run their data stack.
The Use Case
We spoke with Oshri Bienhaker, Innplay’s CTO, to talk about what led his team to Panoply, and his experience with setting up the data warehouse and connecting to their data source and BI tool. Oshri is uniquely knowledgeable on the solution, because he used to work at Panoply!
A central component to the company’s business insights are Innplay’s 30+ Tableau dashboards, now managed by just two data analysts. Every team - from marketing, to data, to operations - starts their day reviewing them. Most customer interaction data, for instance, comes from the calendar: when do people play? What kind of events affect gaming time? This information is crucial to adjusting game features and ensuring optimal gameplay.
With Panoply, we only need two data analysts to manage 30 Tableau dashboards.”
From the beginning it was clear that the ability to extract large amounts of calendar data, custom events data from the app, and other customer information was crucial for the business going forward. Oshri knew they needed a data warehouse that they could seamlessly connect to both their data source and Tableau instance for insights that would grow and delight their customer base.
The Solution
One of Oshri’s first tasks as CTO was to integrate with Panoply - Innplay was a new company, so Panoply is their first and only data platform. Of course when looking for solutions he researched a few options, but he ultimately chose Panoply for its scalability and self-service functionality. With his experience in the platform from an employee perspective, he already knew how the product worked and how it would connect with Innplay’s data sources and Tableau, then scale as the company grew.
The Innplay team found Panoply intuitive, and had no friction getting started using the platform. Their data flows from the in-application events to their AWS solution for streaming and buffering, into the Panoply data warehouse via their Amazon S3 connector for storage and quick access, and to Tableau for dashboards and insights. Now, the team has no concerns about scalability as their business and customer base grow.
The Results
Since implementing the Panoply data warehouse, Innplay is getting fast, actionable insights that will help them tailor the game for their customers.
With all the player data in a centralized hub, the team could perform analysis that enabled them to optimize the game in a way that more players wanted to return to the game day over day.
I had the confidence that I can count on this solution. I know it will work and I’ll be able to scale with it.”
The solution also automated much of the dashboard creation, reducing the time Innplay’s data analysts spent on manual BI tasks and dashboard creation.
Oshri said it’s been great to see the customer side of the platform and the features he helped build when he worked for Panoply. The promise of self-service was realized at Innplay, and the plug-and-play solution means his team is in full control of their data and rarely, if ever, has to contact Panoply support.
Looking Ahead
At just four years old, Innplay Labs is quickly becoming the best of the combined data and gaming world. Leveraging the Panoply platform for scalability, accessible data, and quicker actionable insights, the ways that Innplay can engage with and entertain their customers are limitless.
