With MyVenue’s expertise residing in developing functional and feature-rich solutions rather than building infrastructure, the business began reviewing vendors and products. They needed a provider that could deliver a scalable, workable solution, and produce data on demand without lag, outages, or limitations. Its solution evaluation process was simplified considerably by positive experiences with Firebase Realtime Database and Cloud Functions for Firebase. These Google Cloud products enable MyVenue to implement third-party integrations and seamlessly push changes, configurations, and data to tens of thousands of POS devices operating in intense environments with patchy connectivity. When connectivity is restored, all data captured from offline sales is synchronized.

After a two-month evaluation, MyVenue selected BigQuery based on cost, functionality, and ease of use. “BigQuery was miles ahead of the competition from a cost and support perspective,” said Ialeggio. “Based on our usage and data segmentation, we were able to come up with a highly cost-effective methodology that met our need for real-time data and to query terabytes of data at a rapid rate.” This would support millions of transactions and venue operators’ growing appetite for data beyond live dashboards and reports, like exports to feed their own analytics systems.

MyVenue then spun up BigQuery instances for each of its development, staging, and production environments to understand how to secure data partitioned by different venues in its multi-tenant environment. The business also needed to work on data inputs and segmentation to support requirements ranging from real-time dashboards to reports based on data collected over months or years. 

Finally, the business needed to connect that data and outputs to its back-office systems to support its operational requirements. “Once we had built that framework, we were ready for deployment,” said Ialeggio. “The Google Cloud team provided a series of education sessions that ramped up our knowledge and ensured we completed this exercise in accordance with best practices.”

Venue operators can now extend reports beyond single-day or day-to-day timeframes to months and years without challenging system performance or availability. “After starting with real-time dashboards, we added the ability to generate sales extracts to dashboards and reports,” said Ialeggio. “This could involve up to 17 million sales records from a single venue alone over a 12-month period, extracted in a nested structure from a browser interface. Helping us provide exact functionality of this power demonstrates the value of BigQuery in enriching the service we provide to customers.”

The MyVenue enterprise-level dashboard powered by BigQuery now displays detailed data trends, and issues ‘hot spots’ around a venue. This allows venue operators to be more efficient and maximize spend from customers by understanding where queues are, where latencies are, and what locations are underutilized and can be bolstered to maximize dollar spend during an event. For example, they can quickly identify locations where queues are building and open up additional terminals or make available a mobile ordering option on the fly to fast-track service. “The feedback we receive from venue operators is that the real-time information we provide enables them to effectively respond to large crowds and considerable movement around food and beverage outlets during major events,” said Ialeggio.

MyVenue is also impressed with the support it received from Google Cloud over its BigQuery deployment journey. “From evaluating the solution, understanding how we could deploy and how we could execute, working with Google Cloud was a very smooth process,” concluded Ialeggio. “With BigQuery, MyVenue is able to provide a best-of-breed point-of-sale solution.”