Sport & Leisure
We love working with the Sports and Leisure sector and over the past 10 years have developed experience and insight in sports and recreation, health and fitness and gaming.
The Sports and Leisure sector is highly dependent on consumer confidence and is under increasing pressure to deliver solutions that focus on innovation, quality and value. In a bid to achieve a work/life balance, consumers are looking to get results for the investment they make and, often, an incentive to get the most out of what they pay for.
What we’ve learnt is that the challenge for the industry is the need to engage with technically savvy consumers who are harnessing social media and mobile technology at a fast pace. These consumers expect to be able to interact with brands on a personalised basis, across multiple platforms. The solution for both providers and end users can often be delivered with a strong brand and effective distribution channels.
Our work has included the design, build and ongoing development of a mobile-first exercise tracking application, the design and development of public facing marketing sites, extranets, micro-sites and ecommerce sites, as well as integrating these platforms with CRM's.
Some of our recent clients in this sector
Case Study: Pulse Fitness
To address a lagging market position, we supported a leading UK fitness equipment manufacturer to reinvent their fitness technology platform using Umbraco and Amazon Web Services.
Client’s challenge
Pulse Fitness, based in the UK, is a manufacturer with an award winning portfolio of fitness equipment with ranges including cardiovascular, strength and plate-loaded. Their fitness equipment incorporates the very best in British design alongside the most innovative and advanced ideas from around the world.
Over 10 years Pulse Fitness had developed a fitness technology system enabling gym users to access fitness data using kiosk technology. Initially industry leading, the world had moved on and their competitors platforms were cloud based with connected web apps and mobile apps. During the procurement process for their strength and cardiovascular equipment Pulse were challenged by prospective clients to provide a solution with cloud based technology, web apps and mobile apps.
Our solution
Carbon Six Digital were responsible for re-architecting the PulseMove technology platform in 2014. Moving from a world where customer databases were stored in single tenanted on-premise MySql databases, we designed a multi-tenanted, cloud-based data architecture based on SQL Server on Amazon Web Services.
Working with a multidisciplinary team, including the client and their design and technology partners, we designed an architecture based on well established technologies including .NET, SQL Server, and RESTful APIs with the Open Source CMS Umbraco at its core.
Where possible the new architecture made use of existing assets. Our goal was to web enable the technology not reinvent the wheel.
In the space of 6 months we delivered a new WebApp, public facing marketing and signup website, and API facilitating the parallel development of Mobile Apps for IOS and Android by a third party development agency.
In order to improve the ability of Pulse to deliver safely and reliably, on time every time, to its clients, we put in place key IT processes. These processes spanned project management and release management across the entire platform applying to Pulse and its product management, design and development team as well as third party suppliers. Based on industry standards such as ITIL and Agile, these processes have resulted in significant improvements in reliability of the platform and frequency of releases, getting product enhancements into the hands of end customers quickly and efficiently.
Impact on the customer
Critically these new technologies enabled Pulse to win a multi-million pound project for the refit of the entire gym and associated equipment for one of Pulses closest and most well-established gym operating customers. Since then, Pulse and Carbon Six Digital have successfully rolled out the PulseMove cloud-based platform across more than 75 customer sites, including over 50 local authority leisure centres. By using established Open Source Software and cloud-based infrastructure Pulse now have a platform for growth across the UK, Europe and China.
To date the new technologies have been implemented in over 30 countries across 6 continents. The tracking app has logged more than 50 million in-gym activities in over 100,000 active users, with trends showing a 50% year on year increase for both.
What our customers say...
Pulse Fitness
"Carbon Six Digital have now been our development partner for several years and have helped us to migrate a desktop, MySQL-based software package to a fully hosted, Microsoft SQL-based solution which incorporates our existing desktop software, plus a new web app, iOS app and Android app.
Carbon Six Digital have helped us to understand and fully utilise the Amazon Web Services platform and have worked alongside our in-house design and software development team to design the system architecture, overcome complex technical problems and roll the product out internationally.
Having our web, database and app development with a single partner has vastly improved our workflow and efficiency as we are able to utilise the wide variety of skillsets available at Carbon Six Digital. This means that staff with specific skills can easily be pulled in the solve specific problems or to work on areas of development that require specialist knowledge.
The team at Carbon Six Digital are in constant communication with our in-house team, meaning that we have complete visibility of what's going on and are able to steer the project easily. Carbon Six Digital are also excellent at making complex discussions easy to understand at all levels.
The quality of work produced is excellent. A regular release cycle means that any bugs are resolved quickly and with minimal impact.
I would not hesitate to recommend Carbon Six Digital as a development partner.”
Tell us about your project
We love to help organisations in the sport and leisure sector with building new Umbraco sites or supporting existing ones. Fill in your details below and one of our team will get in contact as soon as possible. If you prefer to write us a note, then send it to sales@carbonsix.digital.
