 The VMworld 2012, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. This is the flagship telecaster cube where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. And I'm really proud to have a real TV person here from MLB, Major League Baseball Network, Cindy Cortell, director of IT. I mean, you're not a TV person yourself, but you actually work for a real media organization not like SiliconANGLE TV. No, no, I actually work for a broadcast entertainment company. Massive scale, international presence, not yet, or you can't talk about that. Welcome to the cube. Thank you. So this is the ESPN of tech, as we call it, and I was using all kinds of baseball metaphors this morning, the modern era of computing, no doping, no steroids, some baseball metaphors. You're in this world and you have history back to being a Unix geek, similar to myself, you've seen the evolution of mainframe client server and web and now media, full on social media, social everything, mobile. What's your take of the current market? I mean, as someone who's in the IT business, is it really as transformative on your end as it is in some of the tech verticals? I think it is, and if you put another angle of sports, we're changing the way our fans are looking at sports. We're changing the view, we're changing how they can see it, so it's a totally different environment for us. I remember back in working with the baseball owners and some of the stadiums, technology was one of those things that baseball people didn't really were a part of, it was all paper-based and scouts had paper, people can relate to the money ball movie, but now technology is a big part of Major League Baseball, the advanced media unit which does the streaming, that's a different group, you guys now have a TV operation, you're in ball parks with cameras, can you just share with the folks out there the extent of the IT in MLB TV, just the TV side, not the streaming website side, but as you go out and bring media into these different ball parks, share with them some of the scope of how big it is. Well if you can just imagine on a daily basis we have 15 games that we ingest, we ingest it in eight different formats, so we have HD, SD, closed caption, SAP, clean copy with no graphics, dirty with graphics, and then just a digitized copy, so imagine the amount of data that we bring in on a daily basis, and then when we impart that data we have to be able to send it to the editors so they need to get it to it in a near-lying fashion, so they can make their edits and do any corrections that they need to do, put video to it, do promos to get people excited about the next segment coming on. And IT obviously has to be near real-time, what's the performance like? What do you guys have for infrastructure? Can you share a little bit of the infrastructure layouts here? Sure, we have connections to all 30 teams because we have the Ballcam network, we have two cameras in every stadium that comes into our network infrastructure, and then from there we take that data, we ingest it, and we can share it with various venues. On the ingestion side, using cloud at all, using or just proprietary networks? We're just using proprietary networks. Okay, we had just covered on the, let's look at an angle, Fox Networks, one of them called Nirvana, which was a big story because it's, you know, Fox Sports, big media company using cloud storage, so they're using, so that seems to be a trend. How would you look at the cloud storage market? That's obviously before you came on, we talked about disaster recovery. What's your DR strategy? Are you going to cloud as primary? Is there plans? Are you thinking about cloud? We are because if you can just think about it, for the last four years we were in build mode because we were startup, we started in January of 2009, and we were in 50 million homes, the largest cable launch in TV history. So now we're thinking about DR and disaster recovery. One of the critical applications we have is called Diamond, it's a proprietary software that we created, and what we use it for is to have loggers and they look at every game and they basically log from each pitch to the various pieces of metadata that occur during the game. So if someone hits a home run, we basically take that entire feed and we take it and we log, like if a father has a son on his shoulders, we can find that data later on. Wow, so you're using a lot of, that's a real time, big data, or little data in a big way. Absolutely. So in a way it's big data in a sense when you store it all. Yes, and if you wanted to see how many times the WB Mason sign got hit during a telecast, we can tell you that. How do you guys do that? I mean, honestly, you get to store it in a low latency database, you said you worked with Oracle in the past, so you know a little bit about databases. How do you guys architect that out these days? In a way that makes it functional where you can make the latency requirements, it's not this huge query. Well, what we do is with the metadata that I was talking about that the loggers put in, that helps us find the data quickly and efficiently, and we have some time frames and we also have some SLAs that we have to adhere to and we meet all those. So an advertiser, for example, might want to know how many impressions he's had on, say, a sign you mentioned. Yes. Then they would want to say, okay, what was the broadcast? How many markers did it hit? You're rolling up all that data? Absolutely. How's that done? Well, we work with different venues, so we work with different companies like Nielsen. They help us as well. We look at the time zone, if it's prime time, offer prime time, and then we collect the data based on our diamond application. So on a scale of one to 10, 10 being amazing, how would you, and Zero being total fail, how would you rate the rollout of, or the pain points, Zero being painful, a lot of pain, 10 being no pain? On going from 2009 to today, you've pretty aggressive rollout. Absolutely. What was the pain like? Was it seamless? What were the key challenges you had? Well, if you can imagine, normally when you build a broadcast network, it takes you a year to build that and to architect it. We did it in six months, and we launched in January 1st, 2009. But the IT group only had two weeks to build a network infrastructure, stand up all the VMs, load all the applications so that the users could be trained properly. Who wrote the code? We did as well as vendors. So you had to basically set a huge RFPs, architect all the different solutions like search, the W Mason sign. Wow. Yes, yes. It was very intense. So why you had VMworld? Obviously virtual machines are a big part of that. Are you interested in some of the software to find data center stuff? Is it more your customer of VMware? We're a little bit of both and a little bit above everything that you just described, but we're looking to look at disaster recovery and the different models for that. We're looking also at the VM monitoring solutions that they have so that we, my group is very small. I only have two guys who are VMware experts, so we're lean. So we have to be able to give them the tools that they need. Lean startup running in 30 markets of the hottest consumer support MLB. Right. That's good. Note to self, don't compete with MLB. Now, seriously though, so you have some stuff that challenges disaster recovery seems like was dominated by tape. You guys do a lot. You probably don't use tape, do you? We still do. We still do. Do you tape for backup? Yes, especially with our digital archive that we're putting to tape right now because it's on beta. Okay, so let me take a step back. So, first of all, MLB, great franchise. From your opinion as an expert in the industry, take your MLB hat off for a second, which put your industry bystander, a knowledgeable person hat on. What is the disruption area that you're seeing right now in the market? Because we're hearing from VMware, abstract away, complexities, pool and automate, which is operating system mindset. You built an operating system really at MLB from scratch. Given what you know about the market with cloud, mobile and social, where's the big disruption that you see? I mean, for the folks out there who are IT professionals that aren't inside the ropes of the inner workings of the things that you see, what would you share with them as the big disruptions? I guess the big disruptions for us is when we do our marquee events. So, right now we're planning for the post-season and then for the World Series, how to get that data back to the trucks that we have in the media compound. How to get that out afterwards so that we can basically enlist the fans and get them all excited about the broadcast. So the feed goes to the trucks, which everyone knows the trucks that sit outside the venues, right? And that's hardwired, right? So you're hardwiring that and then upload would be satellite? What we do is we have a whole network infrastructure that we can bring it back. Like a backhaul wireless shot or actually fiber? It's all fiber. Yeah, coming back to us. So a lot of setup, basically. Absolutely. A lot of provisioning. About World Series, big events like that. Okay. A little small event, right? So for people that are building a media company, like say SiliconANG, what advice would you give us in terms of or other media people on the IT? Or anyone building the kind of complexity of IT that you guys have to do? Because I think what's interesting, you guys have done such large scale in such a short amount of time. What advice would you share for that, for folks doing that? I would say to embrace virtualization because you can stand up equipment and applications in a short period of time and you can do it with a skeleton crew. So if you want to hit a home run, that's the way you do it. Hit a home run. So what do you think about companies like Oracle who have traditionally been the proprietary database and open source? Do you guys have open source? Do you use open source? I mean there's really two philosophies, scale out to open source, scale up proprietary. I mean Oracle is kind of an example. Right. We pretty much have proprietary that we've developed from an application perspective, but from a SQL perspective, we are pretty much a Microsoft shop. Microsoft shop, okay cool. What's around the corner for MLB TV? You mentioned the cameras. Can you share the folks kind of what's the cool things you're working on that you can share that's publicly known? What we're trying to do is make the experience for our fans, I guess second to none. So we're coming out with innovative ways of doing that so that if you're in San Francisco and you want to see what's going on with the Yankees, you can. How do you guys work with the advanced media unit? Because people know them as being like the mobile app. Do you have a mobile app or do you service those guys? They are our sister company. So they're the .com aspect of us. So we basically have collaborative efforts with them. But they have their own separate IT group. They do. They have more requirements. Yes, and so does Office of the Commissioner. That's our legal office. They're separate and distinct as well. What do you think about the social networking market? Because we know this has been kicked around Silicon Valley that we've been experiencing the summer of social media discontent. Outside of LinkedIn, there's been a lot of social media flops, this is the press now. San Jose American News wrote an article. Facebook went public, took a big hit after. Groupon. Twitter. Oh, that's the future. Absolutely. How do you see that fan engagement in those kinds of trends? What's your vision around that as an IT practitioner? Well, it's going to become bigger and bigger, especially from the perspective of sports, because people want to hear what their teams are saying, what are their, I believe, baseball players are saying about certain events or certain games that they're going to be playing. They want to know their thoughts and so forth, and I think that's very engaging for our fans. What was your biggest surprise over the past two years in your IT journey? That's really, you didn't expect, they said, wow, that was, and good and bad. What, good surprise, bad surprise? I guess the good surprise is how we were able to engage partners like VMware to help us to launch the network so quickly and efficiently, and I guess the bad surprise is that we were able to do it with just 14 people, so trying to get more staff is a little bit. And now you got it just right. Hey, you did that for 14 people. You don't need any more people. Absolutely. You need a bigger idea. Okay, Cindy, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. MLB TV here inside theCUBE, the ESPN of Tech at VMworld. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. We'll be right back with the New York Stock Exchange to share their opinion on how they created a massive cloud for trading that would change the game for the exchange, so we'll be right back.