 For our special CUBE broadcast here at AT&T Park at home of the San Francisco Giants, and I'm here with the senior vice president and CIO, Bill Schlau, with also chair on the board of the San Jose Giants. Welcome to the CUBE. Thank you, John. Good to be here. So, innovation and big data are not initially mutually exclusive. You're known in the industry of being very innovative and have a lot of high profile write-ups on you and the work you've done here. You tell the folks out there a little bit about what you guys have done here. I want to dig in some specific questions, but you have a real innovation strategy behind the Giants and share with the folks out there what is your innovation strategy and what are some of the things that you have in place here? Sure, I'd be happy to. Since I first got here 15 years ago, one of the things that attracted me to the Giants was in the mission statement of this organization. Our mission today, it's tweaked a little bit, but is we're dedicated to enriching our community through innovation and excellence on and off the field. And I thought it was pretty unique. 15 years ago for a sports team to have innovation in their mission statement. And one of the things that really attracted me and me to the franchise, and I'd say whether it's our ownership, a lot of whom made their fortunes through technology or our fans, a lot of them have been working in the industry and kind of expect a facility that pushes the envelope. We really feel like that's part of our core is to be experimenting and pushing the envelope from a technology perspective, whether it comes to technology for the fan experience, technology to drive our business forward or technology to improve the product on the field. Yeah, obviously San Francisco is booming with technology and we see here in all kinds of stories, it's a south emission, it's exploding with tech companies, the tech fan base, but you guys have to be technical as well. So I got to ask you, how are you using technology as a competitive advantage and how do you motivate yourself and your team to have that mindset? And what is that mindset as a leader to be innovative? There's a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure in this sport, a lot of money to be won and lost on the field and off the field. How do you maintain that edge? What's the mindset and what kind of things do you tell your staff? I guess it's interesting that you call it pressure. I don't think of it as pressure at all. I just really think of it as opportunity and I think of it as, you know, that's what gets us up in the morning, gets us excited to come to work at the ballpark every day. I mean, it's exciting to come to work at the ballpark anyway, but when you're doing the same old, same old every day, that's not going to get your juices flowing. What's going to get your juices flowing is doing something new, something no one's ever done before in your industry and we get a lot of ideas from other industries, to be honest. I don't think there's anything we've done here that no one has ever done before. We learn and we repurpose things that maybe a different sports team has done or maybe a different industry has done, but really I think from our CEO down, we're all encouraged to take risks and it's okay if we fail, but we're all encouraged to really push the envelope and I try to strive to set that same example for my staff. I emphasize all the time, innovation is in our mission statement, it's expected of us to be innovative and it's not just technology innovation, it could be innovation in promo items, it could be innovation in our food delivery here, but it permeates the whole organization, it comes from our CEO and drives all the way down. So Enchelle has the cadence of Moore's Law doubling every couple of months or years or wherever it goes. Every organization has a secret sauce. What is the secret sauce of the giants? What makes them unique in its own DNA of the culture here in the organization? And I don't know that I want to reveal that there might be some Dodger fans or maybe even Red Sox fans sitting beside me that want to pick up on this. This might be a personal question here. I would say that the DNA, it's really the history of this franchise going all the way back to 1883. There's a lot of pride in the San Francisco Giants and it also goes back to the time when the Giants almost left the Bay Area and almost went to Tampa and came to Tampa Bay Rays and the ownership group back in the 97 timeframe saved the Giants and kept them here in the Bay Area and ultimately built the first privately financed ballpark since Dodger Stadium in 1958. That's this ballpark we're sitting at here right today. And so that mindset started with the ownership group when they came in and I think, you know, secret sauce is, you know, we're all not afraid to fail. We're rewarded for pushing the envelope and it's really expected of us. So I don't really know how to say more of a secret sauce in that. It's in our mission statements, in our DNA it's who we are and it dates all the way back to 1883, you know, when the Giants were founded. So Bill, let's talk a little bit about data specifically. So obviously there's a lot of data flowing throughout this building. There's data, you know, from all the cell phones out there and the audience, there's, I'm sure, sensors all around the ballpark. Then of course when we've got games going on there's stats being created, essentially. How do you look at data as a competitive differentiator and how you can use it, I should say, to differentiate yourself both on the field and kind of running your business. What's your overall philosophy when it comes to taking advantage of all that data that's being created on and off the field? Okay, I wouldn't say there's one overall philosophy but I totally agree with you that data is everywhere here at the ballpark and you touched on three different areas right there that I can just highlight briefly. One is on the field. And on the field, you know, for years, you know, folks have been focused on the traditional statistics and then Saber Matricians came in and came up with all these different, new and different types of stats or profiled in Moneyball or you might hear about today. But we really feel like there's an opportunity to capture some data that has never been captured before and we've been experimenting in that area for a number of years with a local partner. And again, back to the secret sauce, I really think that's part of the secret sauce too is geographically being here in the Bay Area. All I have to do is walk down the street and I'm going to bump into four people who have great creative ideas and some folks in other markets may not have that advantage. So anyway, as far as the data goes, you know, capturing data has never been captured before. So we're using cameras to track data and capture literally, you know, billions of data points a season in terms of the movements of players and the ball on the field. And that's something we feel like every team is going to be there in a few years, but it's something we've been experimenting with for, you know, three or four years at this point. There's no such thing as a sustainable, competitive advantage to us. It's something that maybe you have a one to two-year edge but we want to take those risks. And so data plays a big role in that. We've won two World Series out of the last four years. So we feel like, you know, maybe we're doing something right on that front. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned Moneyball. I wonder, talk a little bit about the, you know, in the movie, in the book, there's this, you know, kind of this tension between the scouts, the traditional way of scouting players and then the kind of the geeks, the stat heads and their approach. I wonder, did you find that to be accurate? I mean, what was it like, what has it been like, kind of bringing data into the equation when it comes to, you know, player scouting and kind of analyzing the play on the field? Was it that stark or was it a little bit more subtle conversation? I think there's a lot, that movie was close to reality on a lot of people think. I think that's quite true in a lot of organizations that there are some old school scouts. But what's interesting about the old school scouts is they rely on data just as much as the new school or the younger scouts. Now let's say somebody who's purely focused on statistics, okay, that's one type of data. But the old school scouts may be formulating their own data and capturing their own data, but just, they probably don't even realize that they're doing it. They're looking at biomechanics and they're making calculations. They're not even realizing it. And they're looking at the makeup or the character of a player. And those are really important data points. And so the challenge for us and for all teams is to figure out how to quantify what was here to for unquantifiable and was in the heads of these old school scouts. And so I don't really know that it's a, you know, that it's a really a battle. It's more of an education process and, but we definitely have a good mix. And our GM himself has been around a long time. So he sees the value of both the old school and the new school. But I don't think it's really kind of, you know, heads banging as what's portrayed in the movie. Well, it strikes me. I mean, in organizations beyond sports franchises, you've got, you know, this tension between kind of the old way of doing things and institutional knowledge that, you know, it's still very valuable for bringing in data. And there's a change management challenge there, I think, in terms of bringing the old in with the new. And it sounds like that's something that's, you know, happening here in your organization and the league as a whole. I mean, I'll give the credit to our GM, you know, Brian Savi and the longest tenure GM in baseball right now. And we've got a lot of people who've been here a long time and we take pride in that, you know, people don't leave this organization. And I give credit to him, you know, he's old school, but he's also smart enough to surround himself with folks who aren't old school and can bring him the data. And he's open minded enough to take everything into consideration. And that's really the key. And we're seeing it out there with the IT market. We have a lot of customers here from HP and other around Silicon Valley that modern era is upon us. They talk about that in baseball, the modern era of baseball. So it's super exciting. We have some questions on Twitter that they're coming through. One came in, in my world, this is from Paul Crawford. In my world, big data equals petabytes plus. Question, what data sources at scale are being used effectively in sports? And I guess I would add a little tack on to that is do you use proprietary data acquisition? You mentioned you have cameras and do you public sources? So private sources, you probably order those for competitive advantage. So what is the scale of data that you guys are doing, just to kind of order magnitude? Yeah, good question. It really depends on what aspect of the business we're in. The baseball side, we're dealing with video. And video takes up a lot of space. And also in the fan experience or the broadcast and the video board here, you're still on a lot of video. And in that space, we're not talking about multiple petabytes, but we're talking about the hundreds of terabytes range in that space. Then we can go to the business side. In the business side, when we think about data, primarily it's ticketing data. Ticketing is kind of the lifeblood of the organization and capturing as much ticketing data as we can. A lot of that comes from a mix of sources. It could be you're doing a transaction in the primary market on our website. You could be doing a transaction at Stealth Hub. We wanna capture all that information and leverage it to make better decisions and to quantify the total value of our customers. So, but that's not like video where it's large quantities of data. So that's maybe terabytes, tens of terabytes, but not as much as the video. And then the last area for us, of course, is you've got the on the field and you've got the business. And then you got the fans. So as far as the fans go, we're not hoarding any of that data. We're tapping into a lot of different data sources, social media data sources, et cetera, but we're not, we don't have a data center that holds all that data here. Well, we'll get you guys a free version of our CrowdChat program for sure that plug in there. So let's get back to the three areas of organization, team, and fans. Give some examples of what we call tech athletes, people who are in the technology field, who are essentially athletes doing things like what you're doing. A lot of work involved, whole new level. It wasn't just punching cards anymore and swapping out disks, IT's not that anymore. It's much more comprehensive. It's pretty mission critical for your organization, the team and the fans, right? So, what are the new tech athlete type roles that you have and what are some examples of things that you guys are doing in all three phases of the pillars, the organization, the team and the fan experience? Okay, I'll give you names of the athletes. Three, I got one athlete in each of those areas I can profile. I'll start with my predecessor, the first IT chief for the Giants. His name is Jerry Drobby. And when I got here, he moved over into marketing and ticketing area. Now that was 15 years ago, fast forward 15 years and I'm not sure exactly what his title is. He used to be director of interactive marketing or VP of interactive marketing or digital marketing, but what he's doing is taking data to make better decisions in the ticketing world. And he's doing an incredible job of it. Started out in the early days for us, we were innovating in the secondary market. Before Stubbub existed, we created a secondary market called Double Play Ticket Window. Then we moved into dynamic pricing and he is using data to make better decisions on a daily basis, but perhaps on an hourly basis to make better decisions with pricing because we're always dynamically pricing our tickets. And then now we're moving even into the world of seat upgrades and recycling of tickets and all of that is in the hands of that athlete, Jerry Drobby who's been with us 20 plus years now. So that's one example. Number two, let's look at the on the field. The athletes, I'll go with a guy named Shia Goldfarb who works in our baseball operations group. And again, his title is probably director of baseball analytics or something along those lines. And he is taking the data from all kinds of different sources. I can't have enough application developers for him or data acquisition sources. He's got a list that we can never catch up to. And he is trying to use all different types of tools to make better decisions leveraging in the sport vision data I was talking about. Data comes from the league, all kinds of different data. So the third, is he a data scientist? Or is he kind of a practice learning on this job? Statistician data science, he wasn't schooled that way. Nobody even leaves here. So he's been here, you know, 10, 15 years. He's now the data scientist. Yeah. So on the fan side, I would say Dave Woolley who works for me and he has the longest title of anyone in the company. I think his title is director of his enterprise architect and director of strategic IT initiatives. And he oversees all of our wireless efforts at this ballpark and that is really key to us. We've sold out 246 straight games at this point and we feel like being here at AT&T Park enabling fans to stay connected is one of the reasons why the fans keep coming back. So Dave is responsible for deploying all of that architecture, all that infrastructure, the wire, our brand new brocade network we have here, our 1289 Wi-Fi access points, our distributed antenna system. All that is under the auspices of that athlete. And that's not trivial to Wi-Fi, is it? No, it's not trivial, work-wise, financially. There's been a lot of press lately about what we're doing here with iBeacons and this new concept of Bluetooth LE. And it's great, I'm happy to talk about it, but Bluetooth LE took about a day and a half to deploy. If that, Wi-Fi, we started that while we were still in season last year. In September, we finished about a week ago, all off season long, millions of dollars to make that happen, to make a ballpark wireless requires a heck of a lot of wires and a heck of a lot of organizations structured behind the scenes. Yeah, people oversimplify how hard that is. Staying one step ahead of it is the toughest part. You don't just put it in and it's good to go for three years. No, if you're lucky, it'll last one full year before you got to upgrading it. So let's dig into the last one a little bit more around the customer expectations when it comes to the fan experience. How do customers kind of push you to innovate? I mean, you've got, people kind of expect things to be simple, Google-like simple, to have all these services at their fingertips. How much is that kind of driving the innovation they're doing here around fan experience? And how do you look at that as, again, I'm curious kind of, you're here in San Francisco in the Bay Area, again, you're probably ahead of the game compared to some of the other major league franchises. Maybe you can kind of put in context, kind of where's the league in general when it comes to leveraging technology to improve the fan experience? I mean, I think all the major sports leagues recognize that it's an imperative to leverage technology to compete with the couches that is the popular tournament. And we don't really want to just compete with the couch because the couch is our product, too. I mean, we want to provide a great experience for the folks who are watching at home on the broadcast. But I feel like because of the market here and because of, you know, we were a Wi-Fi hotspot at this ballpark, the entire ballpark opened up completely in 2004. In 2004, three years before the iPhone debuted, the only mobile devices that people brought in back then were the Compact, iPad, and the Palm, I think the Zire came out later on then. Apple Newton was around, I think, still. Might have been. People bring in Commodore 64s, but the bottom line is we debuted that opening day of 2004. And it took another, it's 2014. Now, 10 years later, a majority of ballparks don't have that Wi-Fi infrastructure in place. It's not normally a 10-year advantage, but I'd say we're generally, because of our fans, because they come expecting to be able to stay connected, particularly, they come expecting to see an HD screen as opposed to a small CRT. I'd say expectations are probably one to two years ahead here in the data. I think every park will get there, but it's just like our fans expect more of all the franchises. It's not just me. It applies to Dave and John and the Niners, all the teams you'll talk to today. Bill, we were talking before you came on about how we love technology, and we're geeks. We love to geek out on innovation and the next wave and something modern. And we were talking about the art and the humanization aspect of data, and that's a big discussion that we talk about on theCUBE. The human element is still a big part of it. You've still got people involved in all these operations, and my wife and I were watching in Trouble with the Curve last night as we were channel surfing with Clint Eastwood, and he's almost blind, but he can hear that the guy's got a hitch and a swing by the sound of the bat. That's kind of an old-school thing. So talk about the art side of the game and people piece of it. How do you blend that cultures together? How do you bring technology with the spirit of baseball, the church of baseball, that culture? I would say, when you ask that question, I think back to when we were building the ballpark and we surveyed our fans and our best customers, and we do a lot of that, and we ask them, when you come to the ballpark, tell us about the experience you wanna have at this ballpark. Do you wanna have a flat screen in the seat in front of you, wherever you are, and do you wanna be ordering food to your seat, and do you wanna be accessing replays and all this? And a lot of them said, no, I do that all day at work. I wanna get away from that when I come to the ballpark. So that's why we didn't force that on you. Instead, what we love about wireless is it enables fans to have the experience they wanna have. It's kinda bring your own technology. So that's really been a focus for us. We still have an out-of-town scoreboard where folks walk around and manually change those numbers. That's not because we're too cheap to put in an LED board out there. It's because we wanna preserve that old-school feeling. And we do that with a lot of things. If you look at the field, there's no lines on the field. We don't mow different patterns in the field. That's a tribute to the old days of the franchise. We don't put names on the back of churches. There's a lot of things we do to kind of still stay in touch with that tradition of the sport and callin' balls and strikes. I mean, if you watch tennis, you got the Cyclops that can call a ball that's out. Of course we could do that here with technology too, but as a league, we've chosen to preserve some of the tradition. Okay, some more questions from the Twitter sphere. The business of baseball is much more about the gate, football, about TV rights as a commentary. And then the question is, how does the business of baseball differ from a data standpoint from other sports? I would say one thing that's very different in baseball versus the other sports, and I was talkin' to Dave about this beforehand, and he was sayin' we found that actually our fans don't spend that much time during a game on their mobile devices because soccer, it's uninterrupted play. And if you're lookin' at your device and stay in touch with them, you might've missed the only goal of that game. Baseball is very different. We got nine innings at least. You got 17 innings breaks, a three hour game, two and a half hour game with 20 minutes of action. That's it. And so there's a lot of time in a baseball game to enable our fans to activate with social media to walk out to our act cafe, to be involved with whatever we're promoting and engage with their devices. So I'd say that's one of the biggest differences is the way fans enjoy our game is very different from soccer and different from basketball, especially as well, those high-paced games. Okay, I gotta ask you about social media, obviously, is that we're on the cutting edge of it with Twitter, Facebook, and other environments now. You can broadcast out and obviously selfies of the rage and David Ortiz was taking a selfie with the president the other day. And social media, how is that impacting how you think about the broadcasting or the sharing of the game, the love of the game, the data, the rights, all the above? I mean, it's pretty wild west. So what's your take on social media interactions, engagement, marketing, what can you share there? I know that Major League Baseball historically focuses a lot on broadcast ratings and we compare ourselves to the other sports and it's tough to compare yourself to Super Bowl. Super Bowl is much more than just a sport, it's an event. Folks who aren't even football fans at all are there watching the Super Bowl, at least watching the commercials or hanging out there with the TV on. But for us, I like to think that a lot of the younger generation, a lot of folks, they're not turning on the TV to engage with our product. Social media is how they're engaging on an online video or snippets or whatever it might be. So we're really looking to those channels to try to be where our fans are. And we built our At Cafe out in left field last summer to really showcase our engagement with social media and this year, our newer innovations are with a partner called Tag Board where we're really showcasing and curating comments to just throw up on the main video board, the Diamond Vision during games and to showcase how fans are engaging to encourage it through our app, the At The Ballpark app, all fans are here. We're really another area of security for fans who want to report issues in the ballpark. We really have our text fair or foul programs, very popular with fans. And so we find that fans are more and more engaging through mobile and we're trying to be where our fans are. It's great. Well, my final question for you, and I'll let Jeff answer it, ask this final question, is what do you love most about your job and what would you share for the folks watching that might be a CIO in a bank or an enterprise who have the same challenges? They have the innovation strategy, maybe it's not as sexy as baseball but maybe it's still the same big data, innovation strategy. What lessons would you share with them and what would you share with them that you love most about the data aspect of your job? Okay, that was like three questions that I think says, so what do I love most about my job? We work long hours, a lot of folks work long hours, but we've got 81 games and we start our business day the same day at the time as anybody else does and it ends maybe 10 or 11 o'clock at night. But we come to work at a ballpark every day and we're not curing cancer, but it's pretty clear what our mission is. We're here to win a World Series and to provide great entertainment value for the fans and when we do, we wear the ring and that's pretty cool. No stock options for us. We're not gonna get rich. We may not be able to afford a house, but our fans, our friends all want to be at us and so that's pretty cool and that's why our turnover is low as it is. As far as the data side goes- Who gets the ring? We all do, all front office, full-time staff, part-timers, interns. The DBA gets the ring? DBA has a ring? Absolutely. Nice. Same thing I presume with the folks at your Red Sox will be just as generous with their staff. But from a data perspective, I do think we all face the same challenges, but what gets us up every day and what I want to have wherever I go is passion for the product and that's what we have here. And just kind of playing off John's last point, what advice would you give to CIOs or other technology executives out there that maybe are in different industries? If you could pick one or two pieces of advice based on your experience in the last several years, kind of transforming a lot of the lower ways things are done here at the Giants using technology, using data, what are some of the things that you've learned whether it's from a technology perspective or change management perspective or responding to your customers, in this case, fans, what are one or two pieces of advice you could share? So two pieces of advice, these are kind of macro, but I would say number one is don't be afraid to fail and encourage your team to push the envelope and take risks and learn from them and try new and different things. So just because a technology is not proven or a startup company hasn't worked with six other companies doing the same thing you are, take that risk, give it a shot, because that's the only way you're gonna really make a revolutionary change, I think is number one. And number two is build relationships with your counterparts at other organizations, not just in your industry, but in a lot of different industries so you can compare notes. Pretty much every day I'll pick up the phone and call one of my counterparts or somebody in a completely different industry who I've built a relationship with and say, hey, how are you tackling this problem or this challenge? And I think we all have more in common than we have different and that's what I love about working in my industry is we compete on the field but off the field we collaborate every day. Bill Schlau is SVPCAO, the San Francisco Giants. Thanks for joining us on this special Q broadcast live at your park, AT&T Park here in San Francisco. Thanks for joining us. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.