 This is theCUBE, live from the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2010. Now, inside theCUBE. We're back at siliconangles.com's exclusive coverage of VMworld 2010 at theCUBE in the Blogger Lounge. And it's end of the day, the sun is coming in through the window here, we're going to do our best, but we have an exciting day. It was packed with action today, Tuesday, all the big announcements, VMWare unleashing all their new products, their architecture, proof points, we've been covering it up and down, wall-to-wall coverage, blanket coverage, but there's no other coverage, like in the secondary for Pro Football. And we're here with my favorite guest, which is Bill Haggard with the Dallas Cowboys. And he's director of IT, enterprise IT at the Dallas Cowboys, welcome. Thank you, thanks for having me. NFL, this is a tech conference and sports is a business, like anything else. Sports is a huge business. And the Texas is a great football town. Tell us about Dallas Cowboys and your journey. Well, what a lot of people don't understand and what we've had to try to, you know, evangelize our message a little bit about is from a technology perspective, we don't just support the football team in the stadium. We also support 30-some businesses that the Jones family owns. So from a technology perspective, everything we did in the stadium, we had to make sure was flexible enough and scalable enough to support all those businesses. And from the sports world, you have to worry about how can you market and advertise your brand, not only inside the stadium to create the wow factor when the fans are there, but how can you get that, you know, brand advertisement out to other sectors of the market? So we want to get some Jerry Jones stories later because I was told by Steve Herrod that you probably had some good ones, Sherrod, that's, first I got to get out of the way, Emmett Smith's hall of fame, speech was in that fantastic. Absolutely, that was a great speech. Classy, very great, very well done, Emmett Smith legend. Absolutely, Andy can dance. He was great. Andy can dance. Andy can dance, that's right, he's a great guy. So IT, so Jerry Jones has a lot of business, football is one of them. Talk about virtualization and you have a story there. Steve was explaining a little bit on the last segment around how you're using IT within the business, obviously to be competitive as an organization can be profitable, right? You got the salaries to pay. Absolutely, you know, from a virtualization perspective, what we had to worry about in the stadium is, for instance, our concession stands. All of our concession stands in the stadium. We'll take credit cards, debit cards or cash. That's a huge technology shift from what it was at Old Texas Stadium. At Old Texas Stadium, we, you know, kind of had the mentality of, you know, 70% break fix and 30% on innovation. What we had to do going into the new stadium was worry more about what we could do with technology and how we could use it to advance, you know, the fan experience in the building. So from a concession stand perspective, for instance, we have 212 concession stands. Each concession stand is treated like its own restaurant. So each concession stand has to have its own Windows 2003 server on the back end to support that. There's 254 of those servers from management servers and the ones just around the concession stands. So with that and a few overhead servers, ancillary ones, we'd have been in the neighborhood of 300 physical servers for just concession stands without virtualization technology. Being able to virtualize that back end, we were able to put that on two HP C7000 chassis on 16 blades. So instead of taking 10 full racks for servers, I have a half a rack. So it, you know, cuts down not on the amount of cooling and power and cabling costs and things like that, gives us the ability to run it in a much smaller footprint. So we have floor space to use for other technology purposes. It just really simplifies everything for you, right? Absolutely. It gives us the ability to manage much more with less in less time. Also gives us a, you know, a DR or resiliency factor that from a completely physical perspective, if we had to do all that physical, we wouldn't have had that ability. So if we have issues with VMware's V motion and some other technologies they have, we have the ability to move those around either manually or automatically to make sure we don't have an outage during an event. You know, the business of football is quite interesting. I mean, a lot of the revenue, of course, comes from, you know, TV, but Dallas Cowboys brand being what it is, real innovator. Yankees is another one doing some interesting stuff. Diversifying the revenue stream has mentioned concessions and other merchandising taking a page out of Walt Disney and other Jerry Jones enterprises. How has virtualization, or has virtualization helped you go beyond just, you know, cost effectiveness, cutting cost, adding value to cost to real revenue generation? Well, I mean, it gives us the ability to not only be able to support our retail business, and we'll talk about that for a little bit. We have 10 pro shops within the stadium itself. We have 35 outside because we control our own merchandise rather than the NFL doing that. So it gives us the ability to have flexibility there as we open more pro shops or, you know, or change things within the stadium. So that technology gives us the ability to do some things that from a physical perspective we wouldn't have had. How many people, how many people come to a game? Roughly, the new stadium is big. It's got a huge, civilian area. And that's where it's a little different too because if the stadium will have 40 or so events there this year, 10 or 11 maybe pro football games, four will be college football games. We'll have eight or 10 high school football games. We'll have another professional fight there. We'll have an MMA fight there probably. Last year, the largest football game we had was opening night, regular season against the Giants, 105,000 fans. So in technology, they talk about policy. You know, QoS, moving packets around, et cetera, et cetera. Steve was alluding to business policy. Like, I mean, hey, if Dallas Cowboys win I might pull up my wall and spend a little, you know, I'm going to buy some shirts. So you can maybe adjust pricing and can you do those things with virtualization? Steve alluded that you guys have that kind of capability. We have the ability from not only the retail side but the concession side. Because we can control all the menus or prices in the retail stores through dynamic menus that the concession stands. So we can control prices or change prices, you know. So marquee event goes on. As the event goes on. You know, family event increased the beer price or, you know, family event, make it more affordable. So you can move things around. Absolutely. Can you talk about the business intelligence system and the data warehouse you use to support that and is that virtualized? The back end pieces of that are not virtualized. Which is not uncommon, right? People don't want to virtualize this. Right, we're looking into that since vSphere has been out a while. You know, truthfully, when we went to implement all the technology in the new stadium, vSphere was not out yet. So we had to get all the technology up and running in a short period of time. So we didn't have the luxury to wait on vSphere, even though we knew it was coming out, would give us that ability to virtualize more of the sequel back end things. So we couldn't do that then. We're looking at now, probably in this coming off season, to virtualize a lot more of that back end than what we currently have now. I had a client the other day tell me that their data warehouse business intelligence system was like a snake swallowing a basketball. And so they didn't want to virtualize because they just had to fence it off and drive all the performance possible. But you feel like you'll be able to virtualize that and share the infrastructure around that application. Yeah, we think so. Now, what we'll probably do is take a small subset of that or some subset of that and put it up in a tester and a development type environment to make sure that if we do virtualize it, we're not going to have the problems but can still get the same performance out of it on the front end to give the information back to the users and the different departments as quickly as they need it. So how long have you been at this virtualization game? When did it all start? With the Cowboys, two years. Two years. Is what we've really been at from implementation, making it right, moving forward. My previous career, I'd probably worked with them four years before that. So that's a good timeframe, the two years at the Cowboys. And you've had experience implementing virtualization prior to that. Thinking about the Cowboys experience, what would you do differently if you had to do it over again? Truthfully from the way we implemented the virtualization technology, I don't know that we'd make very many changes. So my follow-up then is what advice would you give to your peers so they could have a similar experience? Plan it out, don't rush into it. You know, a lot of companies will go and look at a new technology and want to do something new. And their mentality is we have to do it now very quickly on the knowledge that they currently have. For a transformation like we went through, it was about a 14 month long process to plan out what we wanted to do, get the design right, and then start the implementation phase. So the biggest piece of advice is don't rush into it. You absolutely need to look at virtualization technology. It can save you countless amounts of money, but it's something that you have to plan out and do right. How about the people in the process pieces around that? Was that part of the planning? You have to have a great staff. Whether you get your existing staff to work with you or you bring in consultants from outside. You have to make sure that you're getting a top-notch group of people to work with that can take your vision that you're trying to move the technology through and that they understand what you need it to do. Because you can run into issues with some consulting companies in different groups. You know, even your own staff. Somebody may have an ulterior motive of their own that thinks that a direction that the organization needs to move in is not the right move and they want to do it a different way. So you have to get everybody on the same page and buying into the same philosophy and plan. How about the vendor community? I mean, talk a little bit about their role they played in helping you with that implementation. Sure, we went and talked to all of the major players in the market. You know, and what we had to do is get them to open up to us knowing what we were going to go through and show us what their technology roadmap was, not for tomorrow, not for a month down the road. We wanted to see what that technology vision was, seven years down the road, 10 years down the road. So as we looked at their platforms, we could be assured that in three years we wouldn't have to do forklift upgrades on everything and start all over again. We wanted to make sure with what we were going to implement was going to be upgradable and flexible but that the upgrades were not going to cost the same amount of money as the original implementation. Now, talk a little bit about hearing a lot from the cloud service providers this week. Did you consider outsourcing some of this to the cloud or do you with part of your interest? We don't currently, we looked at some of that and we will probably look at that again but what we would probably use more of the cloud for would be some of our DR services, our DR strategy, not probably a day to day working pieces of that. So with all the virtualization we have implemented but implemented between our different locations. We kind of have our own private cloud but we wouldn't really classify it that way. You know, we have three data centers per se. We have the one at the stadium, our merchandise facility and one at Valley Ranch that we do have a DR strategy that passes data between the three. So if we have mission critical applications or a disaster at any locations we can bring those up at another location. But from the day to day perspective we have not looked at or are currently not looking at taking that to a cloud environment. So do you have some RPO-0 applications or no? Close? Very close. I wouldn't know if, I wouldn't quite classify them as RPO-0 other than during an event maybe what would run the concession stands. Yeah. You know, in the retail stores. I mean truthfully once the people are in the, in the facility they've paid for their ticket, they've paid for their parking. Where any revenue's going to be generated at that point is going to be the concession stands or the retail stores. And you could do that locally and then deal with it asynchronously. Bill, question for you on looking forward, okay? Congratulations by the way. Fantastic case study. It's really, business home machines would be brutal. The 300 servers. But looking forward, okay? You got some flexibility in your business got some agile capabilities. You can do things on the business side to make it more of a satisfied environment for the, for your consumers. What's around the corner for you? What's your vision? What are you going to plan for? What's on your radar in terms of, in short, medium, long term, is it integrating into the diverse businesses of Jerry's other properties? Are they already all virtualized? New kinds of products for the consumers? Mobile apps. Mobile, I mean, what are you thinking about? Yeah, in, you know, kind of answer all of your questions. All of your questions. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, truthfully, yes. You know, for Jerry's external businesses, they are currently attached back to Valley Ranch, which is our corporate office. Some of their applications, 95% of them are probably virtualized. If they are in a physical platform now, it's because the software vendor does not support them being virtualized. And when I say that we have some of the businesses we have to deal with that are MRI centers. So you get into some HIPAA regulations and things like that. So that actual software package and that vendor does not support that in a virtualized world. So it's unique. So, that's a one off. Right, so, you know, what we could virtualize when we put this together, we did. What we couldn't virtualize due to vendor not supporting it is what we couldn't. Are there new things that you're seeing that are emerging from developers that you never would have contacted in the past that could build on top of this platform? Different apps and things moving forward that we'll be able to offer to fans coming into the stadium. Last year, we did not offer Wi-Fi to the public in the stadium this year, we will. So if you have smartphones, iPhones, PDAs, different things like that, we will offer Wi-Fi services. As a crowd pleaser right there, Wi-Fi is a crowd pleaser. You would be surprised. So we will do that. We're also looking at some other ways to maybe do some target marketing using the infrastructure in the stadium where maybe we'll push discount coupons to smartphones. Send a text message to some number we pop up on the screen and then return, we'll send you a discount for either something in one of the pro shops or something at the concession stands. So different technologies like that are things we're looking at to make it more beneficial and a better experience for the fans when they're in their facility. Okay, Dallas Cowboys, this is exciting. We're here wrapping up our day. SiliconANGLE.com's continuous coverage of VMworld Live, only on theCUBE. Bill Haggard, Dallas Cowboys, exciting. Everyone loves sports. It's kind of a good insight, real life example and all the other businesses. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, we're going to go to some reruns and we're going to call it a wrap or are we gonna, are we done?