 From the SAP Center at San Jose, home of the San Jose Sharks. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HGST, SportsData Silicon Valley. Brought to you by HGST. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, we're back. We're back here live, special presentation theCUBE. Never dull moment. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANG, and I'm going to introduce Jeff Frick, General Manager at CUBE, Bill Schlau, the CIO of the San Francisco Giants. Great team, congratulations on another great year. You were defending champions for one day. Last night was the World Series, but hey, you guys got a great organization. So give us the update. Besides the Kansas City Royals, beat the Mets, which I'm happy for. I'm not a Mets fan, but you know. So the audience, you think is aware of that though, for the last night? Yeah, they are. Okay, so my hands are bare. I'm sorry, I know you like it when I wear hardware. I know. But we are no longer defending champs. The update for us is... You do better when the patch is on the shirt though, I noticed. Yes, that's correct, yeah. So every other, every other, that's the plan. And today's main activity in the office was we shipped 25 pizzas to the Kansas City Royals front office, following a tradition started by the Boston Red Sox when they were defending champs, and we won, they shipped us all pizzas because there's a heck of a lot of work to do in Kansas City as they're planning the parade. So we shipped them all pizzas to greet them when they returned. But yeah, I'm not wearing the hardware because I just out of respect for the new champs. So just explain to the audience out there the tradition about the ring and why you're not wearing hardware. Yeah, so the players on the field, when the ring, when you win the World Series, but also everyone who works for the organization gets a ring as well. So the entire front office gets a ring as well and fortunate enough to have three of those now. And you could wear the ring until, is that kind of an unspeakable? You can wear it, you can wear it. I'm just, you know, last night, I mean they won like 18 hours ago. So I don't really want to wear the ring right now. We're not defending champs anymore. That's baseball etiquette. Baseball etiquette. It's honor. But the good news for us is we are defending even year champs and we seek to defend that title again next year, so. All right, how about a round of applause? Good job. Good job. SportsDataSV in San Francisco, obviously great stuff. So what's some of the priorities? You guys have a great organization. We've been on theCUBE now three times talking about SportsDataSV. Really appreciate you coming on. It's a CIO, you know, transformation. These are terms that are kicked around corporate America. And even last week at Oracle Open World, the Gold State War is another great local organization going to have a stadium. Talking about the things we talked about. Fan experience, managing your players and managing your employees, those three priorities. So what's new? What's the update? Give us the CIO perspective. Sure, so one of the benefits to not making the World Series, and there are very few when actually we want to, but we do have a little bit more time during the off season to plan and prepare for the coming season. And we do, you know, it's exciting time here in the Bay Area with all the new facilities. The sharks have their new, sorry, of course the earthquakes have their new facility, the Niners have their new facility, the wars are building a new facility, and our park, our place is kind of old. I mean, well, we've been there 17 years, pretty 16, 17 years now, but we don't want it to feel old. And so every off season, we want to continue investing in that fan experience and make AT&T parks still feel like a brand new ballpark. We want it to be around a long time. You know, what's crazy is Atlanta Braves will be retiring Turner Field after 20, 20 years. That's it, that's the shelf life of a new stadium, 20 years for the Braves. And for us, we want to be more of the Wrigley Fenway model where we're around for a century or so. So this off season, we're focusing on a lot of the areas that, you know, from a fan perspective and from a business perspective, we're focusing on meeting the demand when it comes to technology. We call it the Cathedral Model where it's more like a church, it's more like a sacred place, great experience. What are some of the things that create more longevity there? What are the key things that you talk about? Obviously, fan experience being comfortable, Fenway does have a little short seats, but you guys are more comfortable, obviously, modern. But the Turner, that's a great example. Was it, did they not do their work on the front end? Is it, was they not technology enabled? What are some of the key things for longevity? I don't know that it was a technology thing. And I don't, I can't really speak to the situation in Atlanta. I just know that they wanted a new location. And that's the, we don't want a new location. We got a pretty good spot right here. And what's cool is the city is growing around our ballpark. Tomorrow will be a historic vote in the city of San Francisco. Proposition D to hopefully enable us to build out lot A and build out a huge entertainment district there and affordable housing and other things there to kind of expand the city around AT&T park between AT&T park and the Warriors new facility down there. So it's kind of cool to watch the city grow around our ballpark. And that's, we hope it to be that way for the longterm. And I don't think most people know, Bill that you have a significant tech initiative every off season. And I know we've been friends for a long time. You had the scoreboard and scoreboard update and software update last year. We were up talking to you about the high density wifi and the high density LTE. So you do something big every single year to keep it fresh. Sure. What are you looking forward to this off season? Yeah, and that was a, there was a quote that my counterpart at the Seahawks Michael Johnson many years ago. He was also a high school football coach. He said to me, and I like to visit all the other teams as much as we can. We compare notes, we're all friends. And Michael always said, don't give them all the good rides up front. You know, every new, every year you gotta have another ride just like an amusement park. And so that's how we look at AT&T park and we want to continue investing. There's no season when we want to do, you know a hundred million dollar renovation of our ballpark. Every year we want to put more and more into it. So each year it feels fresh. So this, this off season we have three kind of major initiatives on the technology side. One is, as it is every year, continuing to invest in that Wi-Fi network. And so all this past month, we've had scaffolding up in the upper deck. It looks like we're expanding the ballpark and building another deck on top of our upper deck because we're doing so much with the Wi-Fi and the upper deck this year. So that's a huge initiative moving from 1400 access points to 1700 access points and really serving the upper, upper bowl, the last phase of the latest renovation for Wi-Fi. That's number one. Number two is upgrading our video boards because our fans, you know, first of all on the Wi-Fi, our fans are continuing to demand to stay connected and continue to drive more and more high bandwidth content. So that's number one. Number two is our fans are continuing to look for, you know, more high quality video. So first it was standard F, then high def, future will be 4K or whatever the next thing is. So we're upgrading our video boards, not the main board, but all the other boards this off season. That's project number two. And project number three is just expanding and upgrading our storage infrastructure to handle all of the data needs that we have. So talk about how that's evolved as you guys have continued to put more data available. You're shipping more information. You've got all these access point. How do you watch kind of the throughput and the data throughput grow over these 15 years? It's been wild to watch. And it started for us in 04. That's when we became a Wi-Fi hotspot. So this is 12 years in. And in the early days, our ramp, well in the very early days, 04.07, you know, we were 100 fans a game, not doing much. But then the iPhone came out and we started ramping about 100% per game growth, or per, sorry, not 100% per game. That'd go real fast. About 100% per season growth in terms of demand. And so now we're at around, you know, 14,000 fans a game are accessing the Wi-Fi network. The others are using our LTE network. But what we're seeing the growth in now is actually the bandwidth per fan, the consumption per fan per game. So now we're at about 75 meg per game per fan. And total over the course of this past season, we drove 100 terabytes of fan connectivity, fan bandwidth used during the season. So it's kind of interesting to watch that. It's still ramping at about 50 to 100% growth per year for fan demand. And ultimately, at our office, our fan demand and our fan use of the network will actually outstrip our business's use of our own network. They need a fatter pipe. So that's back to the fan usage, video, obviously, Snapchat, Instagram. What, do you guys have a pecking order of app usage or an or iPhone, Android, fan, affinity? I'm sure Uber's pretty popular on the stadium, search pricing around game time. But what are some of the, can you share any data? Yeah, I don't know, I mean. In a total feel? In a total, I can say that Apple's still pretty dominant. So you still see a lot of iPhones at our ballpark and other tablet type devices. So I'd say iOS is definitely dominant in terms of the type of content folks are accessing. What's cool for us is our philosophy is very open. Our goal is very simple. We want fans to keep coming to the ballpark and keep enjoying the experience. And if that means they're going to Uber or going to Lyft, going to wherever they want to go, going to ESPN.com, going to MLB.com, we're open to all that. We just want to enable them to stay connected and to share that experience. And a lot of times folks will challenge us on, well, how are you monetizing this huge investment you're making in Wi-Fi at AT&T Park every year? And we say, well, it's pretty straightforward. 408 straight sell-outs. That's how we're monetizing it. Keep the fans coming back, yeah. Yeah, it's a great experience. What's the holy grail for you? What are the things that you're trying to get at that you can't get at today? Is it business analytics? Is it questions about the fans? Is it captioning that data? Is there a 360-degree view of the customer? I'm just throwing out ideas. What are some of the things that you think of the holy grail for? There are definitely two holy grails. Why don't you say holy grail? I just like think of that Indiana Jones movie too. All the different hurdles you got to jump over to get these holy grails. But there are two holy grails. One, on the business side, is to know who's in our ballpark. Every single fan who sets foot in our ballpark know who that is. Because once we know who's in our ballpark and how many games they come to, we can get a much better understanding. Sure, we know who our 32,000 season ticket holders are, our 31,000 season ticket holders. We know who those guys are. But are they actually coming 81 games? No, none of them are actually coming to all those games. So who's physically in the ballpark? Those are the people that are our most ardent fans. And some of them may never pay for a ticket. They just mooch off people every game. And that's fine too, but they're the big fans that we want to target. Number two, that's one holy grail. That's great. We love you. But we want to know who you are and know that you're a fan so that we can target additional opportunities for you to engage with the Giants. So that's number one. And number two, number one holy grail, who is actually in the ballpark? We know the tickets, but we don't know who physically is there necessarily. There's a lot of different ways to get at that, but we're not 100%. And number two is on the performance side, being able to predict future performance based on past performance. There's a holy grail somewhere there. We take a look at, whether it's a kid in the Dominican Republic or another free agent in baseball, how do you know if they're worth that $100 million deal? Will there be injury risk? Their performance today, what will it project to in the future? There's a holy grail out there somewhere. And there's a lot of variables there, but trying to leverage statistics and big data to make better decisions. Baseball is different from some of the other sports. Football, they sign a $20, $30 million contract a year with somebody and doesn't work out, they cut them. For us, we sign a $100 million contract and he breaks his leg the next day. We pay him $100 million. All right, so I got to go on the other side of the coin. What are the biggest phone calls you get? Hey, Bill, I need more. Fill in the blank. From the players, the fans, and the employees. We'll start with the players. Bill, I need more. Wi-Fi, I need more. Hits. Yeah. I need another phone. I need my PlayStation to work and dug out. I'd say for the players, on the baseball side, it is about bandwidth and it's about bandwidth on the road. And it's tricky because there's no real standards for bandwidth on the road. And so there's somewhat of an incentive for us to make it difficult for the opposing team to connect when they're at our ballpark. Not that we would ever do anything like that. What an inconvenience, that might cause. No water. To rest? Turn out the heat in the locker room. There's no standards for that, really. And so we would love to have a consistent standard across all of baseball because having bandwidth on the road enables us to access all of that data that we use to make better decisions in game. We can control our environment at home, we can provide terrific connectivity. And so this is something we're talking about in baseball, is providing some sort of standard. So I'd say that's the biggest call we get. So you have a traveling base station, LTE, comes with the bus or put up a monopole outside the stadium, it sounds like you've got to be creative. You do have to be creative, you do have to be creative. It's funny, when you ask who the phone, I mean honestly, we've gotten calls that are the Giants IT helped us from the opposing teams in their locker rooms saying, hey, can you help us with the bandwidth? We're down there in about two hours. Hold on, don't go to the field. We'll be right there. So but it's an interesting kind of evolving space in terms of connectivity on the road. So that's players. What do you want to do next? You get players, fans. That was my number one question. Oh you just wanted to hear about the fans. No, fans, obviously fans and employees. Yeah, fans, I would say, you know, what's cool about the fans here in the Bay Area is, you know, whatever's the latest and greatest, they're already experiencing it at home or in the office and so they want to see it when they're at the ballpark. And I've always, I've said for years is our biggest competition is the couch. And so we have to, we've got four or eight straight sellouts, but we, you know, you're at home and you got the surround sound, you got the HD, next thing you know, you got 4K, you got always different camera angles, you got replays. We got to be able to provide a very compelling experience at the ballpark. So that's why one of my favorite things about our ballpark is as you walk around, you know, these are small things. Our park is, you know, 16 years old, but TVs are a big deal. TVs and connectivity to me. And we don't have as many TVs as a Niners Stadium or Yankee Stadium, but it's the positioning of them. Wherever you walk around the concourse, we never, you never want to be separated from the game. And those TVs aren't showing random things. They're showing our game wherever you walk because you're going to get up during our game. It's not like a soccer game where you're going to stay there in your seat the whole time until half time, then you're going to sprint and go get your food and come back. Now people wander around. When you wander around, you want to see those monitors and know what's going on wherever you are. Real-time information, that's the mobile user. Bill, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate you getting the wraps on here. Final message to give you the word. What do you want to say to the fans out there that are watching about the Giants next year? What are you pumped for? What are you excited for? What do we expect next year? Man, I'm excited honestly for the next few weeks and a couple of months here to see what our team looks like for next year. We're going to make some changes, I'm sure, and augment the pitching staff. I think you can expect that. And it's an even year, man. So this is our MO. Get that ring. CIO here of the San Francisco Giants. We're here, special presentation. Sports data SV here in San Jose Shark Tank. That's theCUBE. We'll be right back. Called theCUBE Tank. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.