Black Horse One Brings Equestrian Sports Online with SAP HANA Cloud

Equestrian dressage, a competitive sport where the horse and rider perform precise movements to judges, once relied on in-person events, heavy amounts of paperwork, and a laborious scoring system. That is no longer the case thanks to Black Horse One GmbH. This German company completely modernized the world’s biggest dressage events. They use SAP HANA Cloud, a cloud-based database as a service, as the center of their data landscape.

Now, event organizers run competitions more efficiently, with less overhead and easier preparation. Athletes can compete remotely, receiving paperless results from judges on their mobile devices. At the same time, fans gain an improved experience, with greater interaction and real-time statistics.

Using SAP HANA Cloud Black Horse One successfully transformed paper-based processes into a unified, trusted, and secured digital solution. All stakeholders are connected with a single source of truth.

Industry

Sports

Product

SAP HANA Cloud

Feature Highlights

92% reduction of paper used before and during shows

50% reduction of personnel needed for dressage scoring and visualization

58% of all international dressage shows use Black Horse One’s solutions

For Daniel Göhlen, founder of Black Horse One, the market response has been incredibly positive, with their solutions already being used by multiple federations. “Most international shows are now run more cost-effectively, saving the environment and offering fans a more exciting experience.”

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Challenges: Defining the Data Problem

Equestrian dressage competitions faced various challenges, including laborious costs, complicated judging, and limited fan experiences. With their eDressage™ platform, Black Horse One needed to convince the industry that technology could make it easier to run an equestrian dressage competition – both in person and virtually. With social distancing restrictions forcing the cancellation of live events, the need for such a solution was especially great.

The stakes were high. The slightest errors could jeopardize the competitions, which often offer prizes greater than €50,000. Errors would also harm all the efforts Black Horse One made to win over organizations. Any downtime or inaccuracies would have to be avoided.

In order to be successful, Black Horse One would need to build a high-performance data infrastructure. Large amounts of data would need to be accessed in real-time, while powerful processing would have to guarantee that their applications can run without any issues.

Solutions

To ensure the utmost performance, reliability, and trustworthiness of their platform, they chose SAP HANA Cloud to be the center of their data landscape. All data sources, including GraphQL APIs, STOMP (Simple Text Orientated Messaging Protocol), and multiple organizations from around the world, are securely stored together. This security was critical, as stakeholders needed to be convinced that there would be no problems. With all this data securely unified, the manual, paper-based processes could finally go digital.

Performance was a key consideration for Black Horse One. SAP HANA Cloud’s powerful processing capabilities ensures that relevant data can be delivered from around the world, ensuring fans get real-time access to the live video streams and competition statistics.

The scalability of SAP HANA Cloud also proved important. With this landscape, the central server could be easily scaled across multiple regions for quick response times and fallbacks. Fans, judges, and athletes would not be kept waiting due to poor performance.

Black Horse One’s Data Landscape

Results

Black Horse One did not set out to change the sport of equestrian dressage. Instead, they wanted to change the processes behind it in order to help event organizers, judges, and of course, the fans. With their innovative technology powered by SAP HANA Cloud, the database management foundation of SAP Business Technology Platform, they did exactly that.

When they first informed potential customers of their solution, they were met with skepticism and doubt. Today, Black Horse One’s solutions are market leaders used in more than half of the world’s biggest competitions.

This rapid adoption of the eDressage™ platform and other solutions are just the beginning. Some of the sport’s leading organizations adopted this solution and its connected services for themselves to offer customized training, fan experiences, and more. There’s even been interest to deploy the technology for other sports.

All of this is accomplished reliably and securely with the capabilities provided by SAP HANA Cloud.

In order for innovation to happen, we need the right tool for the job. SAP HANA Cloud helped us build the powerful solutions that our stakeholders rely on. The performance, security, and reliability have been invaluable.
Daniel Göhlen, Founder