Leading Cinema Innovation Across Europe

Cineplexx, founded in 1993 and based in Vienna, Austria, has grown to become the largest cinema chain in Austria with operations expanding to 12 countries in Southeast Europe. The company‘s business model focuses on delivering a premium, consistent movie-going experience to guests across a network of modern, multi-screen cinemas, including IMAX and VR experiences. With around 500 screens and over 80,000 seats, Cineplexx manages its geographically dispersed network from Vienna while maintaining a local brand presence in each market.

To achieve this balance of centralized management and local relevance, Cineplexx relies on standardized core operational systems like point-of-sale (POS) and film scheduling. They also leverage a loyalty program, mobile app, and website to capture valuable customer data, helping them understand and serve their diverse audience better.

Legacy Data Infrastructure

A Barrier to Expansion

As Cineplexx embarked on its market expansion, the company‘s existing data infrastructure began to show its limitations, hindering their ability to fully utilize their growing data assets. The legacy solution, based on Vista‘s cinema management system with its inbuilt data warehouse on Microsoft SQL Server, presented several challenges:

• Pre-aggregated data made it difficult for business leaders to understand metric calculations and data lineage
• Users couldn’t easily drill down to detailed transaction-level data or combine metrics in new ways
• Growing data volumes led to performance and scalability issues

These limitations often led to manual data manipulation in Excel, a time-consuming and error-prone process. The legacy system struggled with increasing data complexity, resulting in slow, inflexible reports that didn‘t fully reflect business conditions. The lack of real-time data hindered quick responses to market changes. Batch-driven refreshes could take hours or days, leaving decision-makers without timely insights. The absence of mobile access further complicated monitoring key metrics on the go. Consequently, the IT team spent significant time maintaining the fragmented data environment and supporting ad hoc requests, rather than driving innovation.