Driven by technological advances and a growing number of users, As Deporte, a Mexican company specializing in sport event management – athletic competitions with as many as 6,000 participants -, has strengthened its management operations by adopting Microsoft solutions, resulting in as much as 35% savings in operating costs and the benefits of an innovative sports experience.
For more than 30 years, As Deporte has earned the trust of its customers as the leading Mexican company in sport event management. Its mission is to motivate both professional and amateur athletes in different sports, and its focus is the production of sporting competitions. As Deporte boasts more than 120 direct collaborators, and over 13,000 indirect collaborators each year. Its sporting events include categories such as cycling, triathlons, and swim races, with as many as 6,000 participants, and an estimated 1.5 million registered users on its web portal.
Faced with significant customer base growth, the company is setting up new challenges for itself, including taking a new step in its digital transformation to continue providing the best user experience.
One of the challenges of As Deporte is to optimize the organization and execution of sporting events with a robust system that can handle all business processes. This system also has to be able to organize and synchronize relevant data for its over 1 million subscribers, consolidate the logistics equipment procurement operations, and gain control of its sporting events budgets, in order to save on expenses and losses.
That is why, by 2019, they had started their data migration process to Azure, and improved their daily work processes with the implementation of Microsoft 365. For As Deporte, implementing Microsoft technology meant a new opportunity to continue providing its users the best sports experience.
Collaboration and communication with Microsoft 365 Business
As Deporte is betting on Microsoft technology, in collaboration with its partner, Alianza Corp. Microsoft 365 Business offers a set of office automation tools for communications and productivity, as well as for safeguarding and protecting all processed information.
With Microsoft 365, As Deporte manages to maximize collaboration and communication among its collaborators, who, by having the tools they need for better work performance, can increase their productivity. Using Teams, Microsoft’s work and communication platform, as well as Planner, Office 365’s planning tool, the Mexican company’s employees reached an optimized level in the methodology and processes for sporting event planning and management. With the communications, office automation and security technology offered by Microsoft 365, As Deporte has been able to modernize the workplace and improve security.
Modernization and consolidation with Azure
In another step towards its digital transformation, As Deporte is modernizing its management systems by migrating them to the Microsoft cloud. Its on-premises servers, Digital Ocean, Rackspace and AWS, were moved to Azure to boost performance in all the processes that the company goes through on a daily basis.
For the best performance of its applications, the company installed Azure PaaS (Platform as a Service), an infrastructure that includes servers, storage, networks, development tools, and business intelligence services. This environment makes it possible to develop all kinds of applications. Another component of Microsoft’s cloud that As Deporte is using is Azure Kubernet Services (AKS). With this tool, containers are managed and operated on Kubernetes, which is the portable open-source platform for managing workloads and services. In the same way, to consolidate and unify all its processes, As Deporte adopted Azure DevOps, a tool that makes it possible to unify all development, operations, and security processes, so that they can coordinate and collaborate with each other, thus creating trusted applications.
A better user experience
Using Azure Virtual Machines, it is simple for collaborators and end-users to interface and manage applications. As Deporte has developed a new application for smart devices that, unlike previous iterations, does not work in isolation. By implementing Azure Cache for Redis, a high-speed in-memory data warehouse, the company is improving the subscriber experience. Registered users to the As Deporte website and those who have the app, can quickly enter, view sporting events, register, check race results, etc.
With Application Gateways and Azure DNS, As Deporte can guarantee the private and secure connection of all internal data and applications, as well as the DNS availability and better performance for better business control and management.
The technology provided by Microsoft allows As Deporte to achieve all the goals it had set out to achieve at the beginning of its digital transformation process. The company has been able to consolidate its procurement process and improve inventory of logistics equipment for each sporting event, in addition to reducing operating costs for each event, saving approximately 35%. Likewise, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the company secured business continuity and maintenance of its operations.
The entire company’s digital transformation has enabled the organization of virtual events for thousands of people, a high value option because it does not expose participants to the risks related to Covid-19. As a mid-term goal, As Deporte plans to advance in the implementation of new technologies to improve internal operations as well as service to end-users.
