 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2017, brought to you by Informatica. Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live here at theCUBE in San Francisco for Informatica World 2017 exclusive CUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My co-host, Peter Burris, with our chief analyst at wikibon.com. Our next guest is Andrew McIntyre, who's the VP of Technology at the Chicago Cubs. Just took a picture of the ring, the World Series ring. Andrew, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. We're excited to have you on one. It's, we love sports. We always say we're the ESPN of tech. I love the Cubs. And we love the Cubs and also Red Sox fan, primarily. But, big fan for you guys. Congratulations on the World Series win. Thank you very much. Yeah, last year was pretty magical, so very happy to be a part of it. And thanks for taking off the ring and letting us take a picture. We didn't stuff in our pocket like the Russian state with Kraft Super Bowl ring. But you're here talking about technology and that's what you do. The Cubs in baseball, you have some restrictions as I'll see, licensing, the league, MLB, headquarters. But also, Wrigley is a smaller footprint. You guys have some challenges there. But how are you guys using technology and why here at Informatica? What are you talking about here? So Informatica has been really a key to our enterprise data management program from the beginning. When I joined back in June of 2012, we recognized that there was really a lack of investment inside of technology, not just in the physical structures of the buildings, but also in the back of house applications. And so we knew that for us to really be the best both on the field and off the field, we'd have to make a large investment of time, effort, resources into data to help us make better decisions. So Informatica is critical for us because that's really the center of all of our data integrations. And it's really the beginnings towards our advanced analytics programs. We always talk about, on theCUBE, we do a lot of sports. We call it sports data, SV, Facilcum Valley to bring a tech angle. But what's interesting about sports franchises and technical teams is they can use data and technology for not only just managing the organization but managing the players and the club and also the fan experience. And Levi Stadium is a brand new facility here. We've looked at that. It's transforming the impact of that. Now you've got social media, you've got TV, you've got content flying all around, but being in person and then you like Wrigley is like a cathedral, like Fenway Park. It's got that same vibe. So how do you turn, how do you use all this together in those transformative areas, managing the organization, managing the team and the fan experience? Well, I think it's very difficult because when you have such an unbelievable facility like Wrigley Field, you want to make sure you don't really mess with the magic. So you really want to enhance it. So when you add technology or add those experiences, they have to fit with everything else that really is Wrigley Field and really is the Cubs. And so even though the technology is not necessarily new, one of the biggest pieces of technology we added to Wrigley Field was video boards. And we had a hundred years of Wrigley Field with no video. And when we started the 1060 project, which is our restoration effort of Wrigley Field, our first phase was implementing video boards. And the amount of time that we spent talking to our fans, talking to the neighbors, talking to the historians to make sure that when we introduced that element into the ballpark, that it fit well with the overall aesthetics, but also the type of information we were going to share and how that changed the entire interaction when you came to a game was going to benefit it. So you're balancing preserving the history culture of Wrigley, but modernizing it for things like video and fan experiences. You got it. I mean, obviously there's always a lot of talk inside of stadiums and venues around connectivity. And that's another major challenge when you have a very old ballpark. And so we have studied the likes of Levi Stadium and we've actually partnered up with one of their providers to help us with our cellular infrastructure. We've looked at places like AT&T Park. Bill does a great job with his wifi and has really led the league in that area. So for us, you know, adding those types of technologies that become a little bit more commonplace these days is also that much more challenging when you're in that 100 year old facility that was never really built for that in the first place. Yeah, wifi seems to be on the Maslow's hierarchy of needs just understood and shelter. I mean, people always complain about the wifi. They want connectivity. That's a big one, isn't it? That's right. I mean, it's interesting right now. Wrigley Field does not have a fan-facing wifi system. Now we do have back-of-house wifi for our operations, ticket scanning, our point-of-sale, things of that nature, but we don't have that fan-facing. And nowadays, that's almost unheard of that you have one of the major league ballparks without it. Now, our cellular coverage is very adequate at this point in time. We're looking to do some massive overhauls of that. But the wifi is going to be a huge push for us because then we see that as that foundational layer that we can then really bring some new, exciting engagements and enhancements to that fan experience. Things like those mobile applications like our ballpark app, other things that we can do with proximity marketing, and then really driving what that experience is going to look like. And as we go to Chicago and they actually, even on the off-season, they go to Wrigley and take selfies in front of the stadium. You guys are certainly a destination. You got to, like I said, it's more, it's like a cathedral of baseball. It's really a magical place. What do you guys do to extend that footprint? You have Wrigleyville is kind of going on. Can you just kind of talk about how you guys as an organization are extending the footprint of Wrigley without changing the dynamic? Yeah, so the Ricketts family has really made a large investment into not just the Cubs, but into the entire Wrigleyville area. And so part of the growth of the entire Wrigleyville experience, if you will, is their investment not only into the Cubs, but also the rooftops into what they call the Park at Wrigley, which is a brand new Chicago park that we've just released, which will allow us to do 365-day programming, things like farmers markets and movies in the park. We'll have a game day activations as well. But then in addition, the Ricketts family is also investing in real estate right across the street from Wrigley and they're building 175-room hotel. And so now you're starting to see this mix of really food, music, and sports all coming together, which a lot of people start to term like the entertainment district. The greatest part about the Cubs and Wrigleyville is that it's always been an entertainment district. We're just adding a little bit more to that and being able to capitalize on that as well. So what kind of analytics are you doing in the context of the entire sets of experiences you've described? Where are you getting the low-hanging fruit that's really justifying the initial use of, but also the expansion of some of the tooling and technology associated here at the show? Yeah, I think in the beginning, and I would say in the beginning for me was really back when I joined back in 11, but the beginning for us is really good to handle on our operational data that really ran our business and really focused on our business revenue lines. And so most sports organizations really comes down to five different areas. It's your ticketing, your merchandise, your retail, but also sponsorship and then broadcast rights. And so for us, really getting a good handle on what was the best ways for us to drive those revenue lines to make the best use of how we price our products, how we move those to the marketplace, both in the off season and during the season, so that we can free up that capital to either invest in other development projects or to reinforce back into the team itself for making the push for the World Series or maintaining a team that's going to be hopefully a perennial powerhouse. So, and Alex has been the impact on the business side for sure. But to the initial question, we've definitely started internally with business operations with a forward thinking viewed towards how do we then begin to learn more about our customers so that then we can do more specific targeted marketing and then as the suite of solutions begin to roll out across the Wrigleyville, we can begin to know our customers, what they want to experience, how do we do better segmentation for them and then when we're communicating with them can be very, very targeted, very, very, you know, the right message at the right time for the right audience. So the value of the data about your fan base must be just absolute goal to not only the surrounding neighborhood Wrigleyville but also the Chicago community at large. How are you, as well as the Cubs have a national fan base. So how are you handling that kind of fine line between what you use internally, how you treat your fundamental core fans, especially ones that obviously attend games and then the opportunity to think about how that might reveal insights about to partners and whatnot from a sponsorship standpoint for folks that are coming to the field. Yeah, I mean, it's a delicate balance. There's no one good answer for it. I think obviously the more information we have, the more data we have, the better we're going to be at making decisions and but there is a delicate line between going too far and starting to push fans away or even the neighbors. So the Ricketts family, when we started, it was all about three major goals. One was the Winter World Series, happy to say that that mission has been accomplished. Congratulations. Thank you very much on that. Oh, show that off. Show that off. Come on, I'll hold it up. The second was to restore Wrigleyfield and so we're currently in a six year phase restoration effort of that and we've just completed phase three and then the third was to be a good neighbor. And so for us, everything that we're doing is not just a part of the Cubs and the fan base of the Cubs, but we got to remember we're in the middle of Chicago, we're in the middle of Wrigleyville. There are neighbors, there are families. This is a community and so everyone feels a part of that community. So you have to be very, very cautious with the information that you're using, how you're capturing it and then how you're using that. And so sponsorship is actually a pretty tricky piece because yeah, you're right. We have gold, right? We have over three million people coming through Wrigleyfield every day. We believe the Cubs nation is about 75 million strong across the globe. And so we want to make sure that that information that we do have on our fan base is used in really to increase their loyalty to the Cubs themselves, to increase their loyalty to Chicago and Wrigleyville, but not pushed too far where we're starting to turn them away from us because of what we're doing. And you have a lot of execution challenges like you mentioned the footprint year. It's not like you're revitalizing downtown Chicago. Some ballparks have done that you've seen. Certainly San Francisco, Colorado, the references are everywhere where you put a ballpark in, it revitalizes it. You were already in a pre-existing community. So you kind of got to execute perfectly on the branding and the sponsorship. So you don't have a lot of net as you're walking the tightrope there. No, you're spot on. Like everything that we do in Wrigleyfield is heavily scrutinized. The media obviously spends a lot of time looking at what we're doing to make sure it's not impacting the overall experience and that we're always enhancing it. The neighbors themselves, whether it comes down to parking or night games or when we added lights, every little piece that we do, there is massive investment of time and effort to make sure it is right. Because everyone, for the most part, loves Wrigley and they want to make sure that it's going to maintain itself for the next 100 years. I lived in, I went to Northeast and undergraduate and Fenway Park was right there. So every time there's a game, it was always parking challenges everywhere. We'd be up in arms, you would know. They finally won their World Series like you guys would thanks to Theo as well. Question I want to ask you, getting back to Informatica, well what are you guys doing with Informatica specifically? Because you said mentioned data management. What solution are you guys using? Sounds like the data 3.0 was right in line with what you're doing. What's the Informatica relationship? Can you just talk more about that? Sure. So one of our biggest initiatives was the beginnings of our enterprise data warehouse. And really to help derive that was the integration of all of our data sets. I mentioned those different revenue lines, but behind the scenes, there's over two dozen different data sources that we need to consume. So we really felt like we needed a platform to begin with and then be able to grow with and that's really what led us to Informatica. I've had a history with Informatica even before joining the Cubs, so for us it's, we knew of their strength, their capability across every product line that they enter is, there's always dominant. You can see it in the Gartner Magic Quadrants. If they decide to play into a specific area of data management, they're going to dominate it. So we knew that a Bessa Breed solution and a partner like that would be good for us both the short term and the long term. Now that's what we've done so far and that focus initially in operations, initially on our core data sources that run our business, that's been our initial. Now we're starting to expand into that fan data and so one of the big things for us from an infrastructure standpoint is the overhaul of our wireless infrastructure across the entire campus. That's going to be rolling out in 2018 and then in addition to that is that Wi-Fi. So now once you have Wi-Fi data and you're providing that to your fan base, there's a lot of information that you can capture from that, mixing that in with social, you're starting to see very, very large sets of data like big data management and that's why we've decided to take that next investment and move down that path. So one of the biggest challenges of doing something like this is not just buying and installing the technology but getting the rest of the organization to adopt it and use it and apply it and turn it into value for the business. What role did you play in acculturating the Cubs organization to understanding that there was a new way of thinking and using data to achieve some of these goals? Yeah, I mean it's a two part question. The first part was when I was hired in, the leadership group, so that's Crane Kenny, Alex Sugerman, John Greifenkamp, they knew that we needed to really increase our game if you will from a technology standpoint. They knew things like customer relationship management, enterprise data management, business intelligence and analytics, these are things that we should have in our back pocket and really be able to grow on. So my job initially was to come in to lead those efforts to figure out the right partners to execute on those. Now, we're kind of shifting and pivoting into, we're expanding the enterprise, if you will, to make sure it's not just looking at Chicago, but we're looking at our spring training facility, we're looking at our training academies at Dominican Republic, we're looking really on a global scale for that entire fan base, making sure that the data, the information can scale with that. So in the beginning with the data warehousing and the analytics, there's a little bit more of a build it and they will come. We had a strong business sponsorship. We, strong business sponsorship on the CRM side, but on the enterprise data warehousing side, some of these were new concepts to the entire organization. So really we had to almost take a little bit of a leap of faith of saying, based on our experiences and our knowledge from our previous employment, we knew that this was not necessarily something that was going to be a, not something that it would be that the organization would push back to, we just needed to prove it to them once they saw it. So that investment and the focus that, very, very distinct focus on proving to each individual business department allowed us to build that trust. And as we got more trust, then we got more requests. So now it's like starts to then speed up of how quickly can you get this next data set? How quickly can you analyze that piece of information so that we can make better decisions? We're running at the speed of business like stealing home here in theCUBE, Andrew McIntyre here in theCUBE. Great, we got the Chicago Cubs inside theCUBE. Hold that ring up one more time. Show that ring. Breaks the curse of the Chicago Cubs. Congratulations on the World Series. Okay, funniest story. Did you go on the IV, look for balls in there? I mean, give us a Wrigley story. Share something about the stadium or experience you've had that someone might not know about. So I always reflect on really two stories. And my favorite one was day two. So day one, you know, you're very excited to join the organization. Crane and John are walking me through the offices. They show me my office. They then, we go down, we watch a couple of innings in the game. We end up, at the time, we hit a home run to win the game. So it was like a walk off to win. Like all these, like the sun is shining. It's in the middle of June, you're like, this is outstanding, you know. Then on day two, we're like, okay, let's take the tech walk. And so we start walking through all of our closets in our data center. And I'm like, Andrew, are you familiar with a rain hat? I'm like, a rain hat? What is a rain hat? I'm like, oh yeah, let me show you. So they walk me into the data center and they're like, a rain hat is a corrugated piece of plastic that you put on top of your racks so that when it rains in your data center, it pushes the water to either one side. And that's where it's configurable because there's a two by four that you can either prop one way or another to make sure the water is flowing off. So then I was like, oh, okay. So now I know what kind of job I got cut out for me. So, but yeah, that's always my reflection back to starting with the Cubs and obviously where we are now. I'm very happy. Hey, but it was a very clean room. That's right. That's exactly right. Congratulations. Really was exciting to watch this past year. Congratulations on the World Series. Chicago Cubs are inside the Cube here. Talking sports, talking baseball, talking tech, with the tech athletes here, Andrew McIntyre, this is the Cube, we're the ESPN of tech, I guess we've been called. Thanks for coming in the Cube. We're at Informatical World 2017. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris with wikibond.com. We'll be right back with more after this short break. Stay with us.