SAP HANA Powers Fan Engagement on NBA website

Posted on behalf of Patrick Wang

Statistics are critical to the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) ability to attract and engage fans and the media. Over the course of its nearly seventy-year existence, the NBA has built a huge database of statistics pertaining to games, teams and players. But until recently, fans, media and teams that wanted to access these ‘stats’ were limited in their ability to do so because of limitations in the underlying technology. Game day statistics were only available the day after the event and website visitors were able to view site data only within limited and pre-defined categories.

The limitations prompted an overhaul of the NBA website. League officials wanted to give the game’s 450 million fans worldwide a site that would offer a more interactive experience with its rich dataset.

The NBA selected the SAP HANA platform to help deliver on its vision. Factors that contributed to the NBAs decision were the speed and performance of SAP HANA, its blazing fast data load times and the platform’s interoperability with other technologies.

The capabilities have allowed the NBA to build a website that supports 20,000 concurrent visitors and offers event statistics in near real-time. The site allows fans to track every play as soon as it happens and statistical data on the site can be viewed in more than 4.5 quadrillion combinations.

The performance improvements have boosted traffic to the site by over 66 percent with people on average spending about 50 percent more time on the site than before.