Case Study: Swing King Scales For Growth

Canopy Makes It Easy For Swing King to Troubleshoot Without Visiting a Site

Golfer

Situation

Swing King is a golf technology company that runs unattended hole-in one contests for about 400 golf courses across the U.S.

Swing King uses its network of point-of-sale terminals to sign players up and has about 1,600 HD cameras to verify the outcomes of games remotely and automatically.

Swing King cameras

Complication

Remotely managing multiple different SKUs of hardware, firmware and software for thousands of unattended devices quickly became unscalable for Swing King's device operations team.

Swing King had trouble keeping their rapidly growing device fleet up and running and any camera / payment outages prevented their game from being transactable.

"Trying to manage devices at scale was just impossible without the ability to monitor at the end point. We operate remotely, so if a device is down, we can't transact and that's a big deal."
Eric Hoersten
Swing King co-founder and COO/CTO

Action

Swing King installed Canopy’s remote device operations SaaS on all their hardware to simplify, automate and scale the management of all its unattended endpoints.

Canopy screenshot

CanopyTM enabled Swing King to build remote automations that would solve many downtime issues in the background.

"Canopy helps us monitor, maintain, & proactively manage our endpoints. The real differentiator was the large number & types of devices Canopy can connect to," said Eric Hoersten, Founder, CTO, COO of Swing King.

Swing King also leveraged Canopy's seamless integrations to start feeding the endpoint data Canopy collected into other back-end systems, simplifying their tech stack

"Canopy's ability to integrate into the other back-end systems we were already using, only expanding its overall value to us," Hoersten added.

Results

Canopy eliminated the need for additional Level 1 support representatives, enabling Swing King to more than triple its number of courses without adding a single new full-time employee.

Canopy simplified inventory management for Swing King so they could easily visualize and organize their assets allowing them to scale deployments without having to scale support staff.

...
Eric Hoersten, Swing King co-founder and COO/CTO

"We knew we needed this from day one. Canopy is an enterprise-class solution that allowed us to grow our number of deployments without having to bring on additional IT resources to manage the new device onboarding & maintenance process," said Eric Hoersten, Founder, CTO, COO of Swing King.

Swing King improved speed to recovery and reliability by generating automatic alerts when an issue was detected and identifying the root cause through data integrations and business logic.

"Canopy makes all our different data sources communicate, so we are more efficient in the field. We’d know from one source that the power was working which meant another component had to be the issue; Canopy makes sure that your right arm is talking to your left arm," Hoersten noted.