 You're watching a special broadcast of theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events to extract the signal of noise and we are live in San Francisco at AT&T Park, San Francisco Giants, home of the world champion giants here live in a special event sponsored by HB. We're excited to be here. We're going to talk to all the tech athletes and the giants, the earthquakes, the sharks, the warriors in spirit is not going to be here and they're going to have a great time. It's an amazing event and I'm joined with Jeff Kelly, my co-host and Jeff Frick who put together guys, great event here about big data and sports. Who would have thought big data would be a big part of it? Jeff, let's start with you. What's your take on this event and why is it so important? Well, you know, we spend a lot of time at events and talk to a lot of vendors, people supplying technology, talking about technology, but you know, everybody wants to know who's doing something with technology? Who's making a difference in their company with technology and there's a lot of interesting stories about security and banks and finance, but you know, we like sports. Some of the most innovative sports teams and organizations in the country, if not the world are right here in the Bay Area with a lot of new ownership changes, new stadiums, new innovation. And in fact, just you know, if you walk in downstairs here at the Giants and Executive Offices, the first plaque you see as you walk in the door, their number one value is innovation, innovation. So we're really excited. We've got some of the greatest practitioners of big data out there. And unlike most of us, most of us don't work every day in front of 40,000 people watching us live and not to mention how many on TV. So it's a special group of people that really are taxed to deliver each and every day and we're excited to get them on. If you're watching theCUBE, you're normally used to seeing us going, getting very geeky, talking about speeds and feeds, getting in the weeds and the technology, but we also like to talk about the very high level, the business impacts and the leadership around big data because we are living in a modern era and we have Jeff Kelly who's the chief analyst of the big data practice of our organization that's looking at the network, Wikibon. Jeff, big data you hear about Hadoop, data warehouses, flash memory, all the geeky stuff that puts people to bed at night sometimes. But here we're talking about sports, mainstream consumer topics, consumerization. They're geeks too and they have to be because they be competitive, they have to be. So what's your assessment of how do they cross over and maintain that cutting edge business advantage and still be geeky? Well, I mean of course we talk about the different technologies that make up big data and there's a lot of debate around that, whether it's Hadoop or analytic databases, visualization and all those interesting technologies, but ultimately they're just an able shot. So what they do is they enable companies, in this case sports franchises to be more competitive. What's really interesting about these sports franchises is it's not just kind of helping run their business but it's the fan experience, it's the players on the field. So it really touches every area of their business and of course this kind of all kind of came to the fore with Michael Lewis's book Moneyball back 10 plus years ago with Billy Bean and the Oakland A's. And it'll be really interesting tonight to have these conversations to see how far we've come in the way sports franchises use data and not just in baseball but in other sports as well. I'm really interested in some of the other sports as well because of course baseball well known, tons of statistics going back 100 plus years. So obviously that's ripe for data analysis but it'll be interesting to hear how other sports hockey, soccer, football are able to take advantage of data as well to kind of improve the product on the field but again also off the field. How are you running your fan experience? How are you running your business? So it's really gonna be a great night. Looking forward to hearing these stories and ultimately yeah, we talk about the technology but it's an enabler. It's all about the practitioners driving business value and that's what tonight's about. Jeff, I'm looking forward to hearing from them about how the game has changed relative to technology. Obviously in the old days Scouts didn't have laptops. The fans in the ballpark were watching live, listening to the radio, maybe watching on TV. Now everyone's connected. I was watching that movie Trouble with the Curve and Clint Eastwood, you know, he can hear the bat. So I want to hear how technologies still maintain that artistic feel for the game and how does that change how they feel the personnel? Does it double the staff, triple the staff? Does it change the game? What are you looking for? Well it's funny, it's from the sweet level all the way to the grass and you know we talk about baseball and it's just coming out of spring training, opening day, it was a few days ago and what do they always talk about, right? The smell of the fresh cut grass. Well my latest ESPN magazine, what I open up is read about Bill putting in a new system here that measures the humidity, it measures the moisture, it measures everything down in the grass and the dirt not only to provide a better experience for the grass but also to save energy, to save water. So I mean we are literally talking about technology from all the way up at the top at the level of the suites and the offices all the way down to the groundskeepers and the guys trying to keep it beautiful so I'm looking forward to it. I'm excited to get the guests on, let's get the show underway. Okay, we're going to hear from people who are building new stadiums to having existing stadiums in technology. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back with our next guest at this break.