Large Media Company

Modernized customer data to support large-scale digital services

A large media company operating widely used digital services launched a data transformation initiative to modernize its customer data architecture.

The organization’s services generate large volumes of behavioral data from web, mobile, and streaming platforms across different devices. As the number of digital services and data sources continued to grow, the existing data environment could no longer support the organization’s evolving analytics and data needs.

The legacy data warehouse had become difficult to scale and maintain. At the same time, different teams across the organization needed better access to reliable customer and usage data to support service development and data-driven decision-making. The company set out to redesign its data architecture to better handle large data volumes while ensuring that data could be used efficiently across multiple business domains.

The transformation aimed to move beyond a traditional centralized data warehouse toward a modern architecture based on data mesh principles. This required redesigning the customer data platform to support distributed data ownership, improved data quality, and scalable data processing across teams.

Designing and building a modern data platform

Recordly’s data engineers joined the customer’s internal data transformation team in a multi-vendor setup working alongside data engineers and architects responsible for customer-related behavioral and consumption data. The team focused on building a modern cloud-based data platform and a new data warehouse designed to replace the legacy environment.

Instead of performing a direct lift-and-shift migration, the transformation focused on redesigning the architecture and improving existing data models. A new data warehouse was built on Snowflake, with data modelling and transformation pipelines implemented using dbt to enable structured, maintainable, and automated data workflows.

The platform integrates behavioral data collected from multiple digital services and devices, including mobile applications, browsers, and streaming devices. In addition, the solution processes internal master data shared within the organization through message bus systems and incorporates external data sources such as social media data. Recordly also supported domain development teams with dbt development practices to ensure consistent data engineering standards across the platform. Additionally, Recordly supported other teams by sharing knowledge regarding the data products the domains gained ownership of because of the data mesh architecture introduction.

The new architecture provides a scalable foundation for managing and utilizing customer and behavioral data across the organization. By moving to a modern cloud-based platform, the company improved its ability to process large volumes of usage data and make it available for analytics and service development.

The adoption of data mesh principles enables different domains within the organization to develop and manage their own data products while maintaining shared governance and standards. This improves the accessibility, maintainability, and long-term scalability of the data platform.

With the new architecture in place, the organization is better positioned to support data-driven decision-making, improve digital services, and develop new data capabilities as its data volumes and service ecosystem continue to grow.

"Recordly’s team brought strong expertise in dbt and data engineering. They were willing to take on very large and complex data domains that require both technical skill and confidence.

The data products created by Recordly’s team are already used by several stakeholder teams, and many of our key data assets, such as recommendation systems and various KPI metrics, now rely on them.”

Long-term partnerships often yield the best results. In this customer case, we are sharing this reference without naming the client due to confidentiality agreements, but we still want to highlight the goals, activities, and impact of our collaboration.

Recordly and large media company 3 - Photo by unsplash