DICK’S Sporting Goods creates an omnichannel athlete experience using Azure Arc and AKS

DICK'S Sporting Goods creates confidence and excitement by inspiring, supporting, and personally equipping all athletes to achieve their dreams. Founded in 1948 and headquartered in Pittsburgh, the leading omnichannel retailer serves athletes and outdoor enthusiasts in more than 850 DICK'S Sporting Goods, Golf Galaxy, Public Lands, Moosejaw, Going Gone! and Warehouse Sale stores, as well as online and through the DICK'S mobile app. DICK'S also owns and operates DICK'S House of Sport and Golf Galaxy Performance Center, as well as GameChanger, a youth sports mobile app for scheduling, communications, live scorekeeping, and video streaming.

“We call our customers athletes, and we’ve built up an environment within our stores that give them experiences they won’t receive at other retail locations,” says J.P. White, Senior Director of Engineering, Stores & Omni, DICK’S Sporting Goods. “We have rock walls and HitTrax cages, where they can go in and try the latest baseball bats and softball technology. We also have golf simulators and putting ranges, which engage athletes and empowers them to be the best they can be and to try new things.”

Technology plays a critical role in how DICK’S Sporting Goods engages with athletes, both in its stores and beyond. White says the company wants to create additional consistency across stores and online to “connect with athletes where, when, and how they want to connect with us.”

Build once and deploy anywhere to all stores  

To achieve that vision, DICK’S Sporting Goods first had to wrestle with hard questions. 

“The questions we grappled with were: Can we better track the interactions that our athletes have within the store, so that we can develop a better understanding of what it is they need and want? And then, how can we act on that to get the latest and greatest software and application updates to our edge locations or retail stores?” says White. 

The company envisioned creating a “one store” strategy that would give it the ability to write, deploy, manage, and monitor its own software across all locations nationwide—and map those same experiences through its online retail. For example, the company wanted to create and deploy applications for special promotional experiences to each of its stores simultaneously, while also reflecting them online. 

The organization also wanted to create an environment that would support ongoing innovation and application development to drive mass personalization. This could mean creating applications that provide personalized guidance to athletes, or the parents of young athletes, both in the store and online, to point them to the products and services that best suit their needs. Guidance could include equipment recommendations, suggestions for local and regional sports leagues to participate in, or skill and fitness trainings that DICK’S regularly offers in-store and online. To make this happen, DICK’S knew it had to migrate its on-premises datacenter technology to the cloud and create a seamless, cloud-to-edge development cycle. 

Expanding possibilities: An adaptive cloud for a hybrid and edge environment

“We needed a cloud service that brought together our store and online omni channels with our retail and eCommerce systems,” says White. “Our vision was to run our software in a manner that provides us with as much flexibility as possible to meet our athletes’ expectations as well as market expectations, and to do so in a cost-effective manner.”

The DICK’S technology team did a massive audit to understand the best way to achieve its goals, testing many solutions from different companies before choosing to work with Microsoft and migrate to Microsoft Azure. “We brought together a cross-section of engineers to work on the Azure migration, and we had incredible help from the Microsoft Industry Solutions and product teams in the process,” says Jon Hathaway, Senior Technical Lead, DICK’S Sporting Goods. ”Microsoft was the only company that could help us do the full end-to-end modernization of applications into things like Kubernetes.”

With Microsoft technologies like Windows Server, AKS hybrid, Azure Arc, Azure Update Manager, and GitHub, DICK’S technology team realized it could do all of the data processing and data workloads it needed by running in the cloud. “Together with Microsoft, we created an adaptive, hybrid and edge environment with all stores using Azure Arc and AKS,” says Hathaway. “Using Azure Arc, we could create a bridge from the cloud where our teams build new applications to all retail stores for easier deployment.” In addition to these technologies, DICK’S Sporting Goods is also using Microsoft Azure AI services and Azure PostgreSQL.

Hathaway adds, “We ended up with the Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Arc solution—not because we were looking for it, but because our account team, and specifically some of our Microsoft developer advocates, knew and understood where we wanted to go as a company. Microsoft provided training and responded quickly to our team’s questions throughout the migration and development process—it was a game-changer.”

In addition to creating a more streamlined retail experience, the DICK’S technology team is migrating to Azure for its performance and resilience. Crowe explains, “With Azure, we now have the ability to migrate our Windows VMs, as well as our SQL instances, natively to the cloud to make use of Azure Marketplace VMs.” Prior to migrating, the Windows, Edge, and IoT team at DICK’S Sporting Goods had to maintain their own Windows golden images with the applications baked in. Since migrating to Windows Server and SQL on Azure, “we are able to tie together those two solutions as if they were one, allowing us to deploy images in a desired state. It’s literally set it and forget it,” says Crowe. 

Additionally, DICK’S Sporting Goods unified its toolset for patching and preventing server drift with Azure Update Manager. “Azure Update Manager is going to be, quite honestly, a significant revolution for us. We have Windows Server Update Services servers in our environment, and now when we have to patch and remediate vulnerabilities, Azure Update Manager will allow us to have that in one view,” says Crowe. 

Mass personalization at scale with AI 

Although it’s still in development, White says that the Microsoft adaptive cloud approach provides DICK’S Sporting Goods with the expansion capabilities it needs to add more stores, new services, and new experiences. These might include connecting with a parent who has a first-time athlete, sharing educational information about equipment requirements for specific sports, or recommending potential leagues to participate in. It could even highlight what virtual and in-store training opportunities DICK’S offers to help build athletic skills. “Today, the team is able to move quickly when we need to get something out to stores,” says White. “It’s helping us make the athlete experience ubiquitous.”

Beyond that, adaptive cloud is empowering DICK’S tech teams to greater innovation. “We can manage the implementation of new apps from the stores’ technology teams more effectively, from provisioning to security. We are able to manage the system with greater capabilities; the system can heal itself, reprovision, and we can deploy to all of the stores at once,” says Hathaway. “With Azure AI and our ongoing relationship with Microsoft, we’re excited about the possibilities for extending innovation even further across our omnichannel retail experience.” 

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