Performance Enhancement and Cost Reduction in Database Servers for Kicker

• Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
• Robots - Wheeled Robots

• Telecommunications

• Sales & Marketing

• Intelligent Packaging

German football publication, kicker, faced a significant challenge as its website and mobile platform continued to attract new readership. The company's existing tech stack was reaching its performance limitations, unable to keep up with the growing demand. The kicker.de website generates more than two billion page impressions per month, with a yearly growth rate of over 15%. The mobile version of the website, along with kicker’s app, also experienced phenomenal growth. As the audience continued to grow, the performance limitations of the company’s existing tech stack became apparent. The tech team realized the need for an intelligent caching solution to maintain performance and user satisfaction.

Founded in 1920, kicker is a German football publication that has been delivering football content to a German audience for over a hundred years. The company launched its digital edition in 1997, bringing its sports stories to fans worldwide. Readers come to kicker for its profiles of football legends and rising stars, a unique game live-ticker, analyses and commentary, and a vast collection of media content, including galleries and videos. The kicker.de website generates more than two billion page impressions per month, with a yearly growth rate of over 15%. The mobile version of the website, along with kicker’s app, have also enjoyed phenomenal growth in recent years.

Initially, kicker's developers implemented an open-source Redis solution for a caching solution for its website. However, as the international user base grew rapidly, relying on the open-source version of Redis became an operational headache. Scaling Redis required manual intervention for configuration, integration in monitoring environments, and other operational aspects, quickly increasing complexity, deployment overhead, and corresponding overall total cost of ownership (TCO). The team decided to upgrade to Redis Enterprise. Its intelligent caching solution dramatically improved the performance of both the website and mobile app. This had a direct impact on the overall user experience, with users obtaining the desired information faster, leading to higher customer satisfaction. By providing fast content delivery and sustainably increasing the availability of the portal, kicker was able to cover the growing advertising reach, noticeably adding to the overall conversion rate of both solutions.

• By using Redis Enterprise, kicker’s team was able to retire previously deployed hardware and software. Redis Enterprise proved it could meet both current and future scalability requirements. The intelligent caching solution increased the website and mobile app performance substantially compared to the previous versions without the caching in place. This had a direct impact on the overall user experience, with users obtaining the desired information faster, leading to higher customer satisfaction. By providing fast content delivery and sustainably increasing the availability of the portal, kicker was able to cover the growing advertising reach. This noticeably added to the overall conversion rate of both solutions. The kicker team is planning to use Redis Enterprise for an expansion of the brand, as well as considering it for a future project that will provide indexing capabilities for both current and archived content.

• Reduced spend on web servers by 40%
• Cut costs for database servers by 60%
• Significantly reduced operational expenses, complexity, and overall TCO