A global sports equipment manufacturer with more than 1,000 employees — designing, marketing, and selling custom golf equipment and apparel across both retail stores and ecommerce — had grown fast. That rapid expansion left behind a patchwork data architecture, stitched together by multiple teams with different skill sets and competing priorities.

Over time, the architecture could no longer support the advanced data products, including machine learning, that the company needed to drive sales growth worldwide. Strict governance and permission structures meant onboarding each new data source was a complex project with long implementation timelines.

The data infrastructure had become so complicated that the team was hesitant to tackle either its complexity or its limited access. They needed a partner to implement a modern data lake — and to train the staff who would run it.