Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment's Journey with Informatica iPaaS for Enterprise Integrations and Data Management

1. What is your name and title?

Jonathan Pilieci – Manager, Data Solutions

2. What is your primary role? What does your company do, make or is known for?

I lead the team that handles the enterprise integrations and data management for Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. We own and operate several properties, including the Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Raptors, Toronto Argos, Toronto FC, venues, restaurants and retail.

3. What were the challenges that brought you to work with Informatica?

Our previous integration solution posed a few difficulties and required specialized developers. As a result, we needed a stable, reliable solution that was able to be learned by any developer.  Thus, we chose Informatica for an AI-powered data management solution. 

4. What did you build with the Informatica on AWS to solve that challenge?

We are currently in the process of migrating to a new lake house architecture powered by Amazon's S3 and Amazon Redshift AWS. This includes a complete redesign of our data ecosystem, adding a data lake, data cataloging, automated deployment, etc.  Informatica will play a key role in loading the data in our data lake built on Amazon S3 as well as transforming and cleansing the data before moving to Amazon Redshift.

5. What AWS services did you leverage and how?

We use a slew of AWS Services now, from AWS Lambda’s, Glue, S3, Athena, RedShift Spectrum, as well as EC2 and RDS instances with the Informatica IDMC platform to support our modern data strategy.

6. What AWS services, products, programs, etc. were used?

The AWS ProServe team played a key role in designing and build a framework around all the various AWS Services. The data journey kicks off with ingestion from the source, utilizing AWS Lambda functions and Informatica IDMC.  It then lands in an S3 bucket, is cataloged, transformed and cleansed through Informatica and Glue, then modeled into dimensions and facts within the RedShift data warehouse.    Athena facilitates seamless data querying across all stores and serves as a conduit for the analytics team in their data discovery endeavors.

7. How has your collaboration with Informatica benefited your business, employees, and/or end customers?

We have significantly improved our integration capabilities, reducing delivery times from months to mere weeks. Over the past year, we've successfully incorporated more than 20 diverse data sources into our data warehouse. This marks a remarkable improvement as in the previous four years when we struggled to integrate just 4 or 5 sources. 

Our critical integrations, such as financial and point of sale integrations, are now exceptionally stable, with rare instances of failure. We have approximately 40 daily CAI processes, featuring over 1000 different executions, as well as 113 CDI Mapping Tasks executing 3230 times per day, processing 60 million records. These operations maintain an impressively low failure rate of just 0.005%, instilling greater confidence in our system and processes among both our team and the business.