 From the SAP Center at San Jose, home of the San Jose Sharks. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HGST, Sports Data, Silicon Valley. Brought to you by HGST. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in theCUBE's special presentation here at the Shark Tank, the SAP Center. This is Silicon Angles Cube. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We're here for our special event for sports data, SV. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. Our next guest is John Tortora, Chief Operating Officer of the San Jose Sharks. Welcome back to theCUBE, second time on Sports Data SV and here on your home turf. Yes, thank you very much for having me and thank you for using SAP Center as your playground for tonight. We appreciate it. We love the theCUBE logo on the big board and the HGST, Sports Data, ST hashtag, Sports Data, SV. Last time we talked, we had a great conversation. So just jump right into it. The role of impact of technology for the sharks. Explain to the audience what that has happened. What has that done to your organization? How has that changed? Well, it's helped us in both internal ways and external ways. Internally, we've been using an SAP affiliated product called Business by Design to help with our accounting software for years now. We also use Success Factors, which is an employee performance measurement tool for reviews and that sort of thing. We've been using that product for two or three years now with great success. It allows people to review their employees in a real time manner for employees and check on their goals and their status and disease as the year goes on. We've also been using Jam, which is another SAP product. It's an intranet site where employees can learn about other employees, who they report to, so forth and so on. We've grown as a company over the last year or so. We've added about 45 new employees so the ability to know who the employees are is very important. Externally, we also want to figure out who our customers are. I heard the Giants speak earlier, Bill, and his focus was on understanding their customer, who's in the arena, who's in the stadium. We are no different. In fact, any company that deals with consumers is no different. We want to know who's buying our product. We want to create a 360 degree profile of our customer. And what we have done over the off season is create a business intelligence department focusing solely on data, big data analytics and understanding who our customers are, how they're consuming, not just sharks games, but are they coming to the arena for other reasons, for concerts, for family shows, for seminars? Are they going to sharks ice? We manage three recreational ice facilities. We have over a million people going to sharks ice every year. Figure skating, curling, ice hockey. We want to understand who those customers are. Are they buying sharks tickets? And if they're not, why not? And if they are, do they want more? So it's all about understanding those customers. And the sharks are blessed in so many ways. But one of the reasons we're blessed is our ownership. Hossil Plotner is the co-founder of the SAP software company. He's also the 95% owner of the sharks. And we can integrate with SAP. They're based here in Palo Alto. We can figure out what our big data needs are and SAP can adapt their infrastructure to meet our needs. And the partnership works wonderfully well. So you're sitting here in the middle of Silicon Valley. You've got a bunch of tech companies, including HGST and SAP, around the rink as sponsors. But as you said, you are also tapping back into their expertise to help you guys run your business. That's a tremendous advantage that you've got sitting here. That's absolutely right. And our great partners like HGST have been partners for years and we appreciate their support. And they're coming out today as well. But that's right. Because of our proximity, we can share ideas regularly with them and build a better product and ultimately a better consumer experience. And you just mentioned a ton of different activities that you guys are working on beyond just the San Jose sharks, which is obviously the face of the franchise, the face in the building. Share with the audience how important it is to have these ancillary businesses, if you will. Ancillary is probably the bad word. I apologize for the concerts and all the other stuff. But again, from kind of the name on the building, we think sharks, right? We think Shark Tank. But you're doing a whole host of things to engage your customers. Not only the season ticket holders that come down for a hockey game, but people that engage really with this building in your kind of extended community, if you will. Your extended reach. That's right. People associate our ownership group with the San Jose sharks, but we're a lot more than just the sharks. That's obviously the most high profile item. But the city of San Jose owns SAP Center, but we have been the manager of the facility since it opened in 1993. And we have complete P&L responsibility for the facility, complete operational control of the facility. So we handle the labor unions that do the cleanup crews, so forth and so on. We're responsible for Wi-Fi upgrades, all those types of things. And the relationship has been quite good with the city. But yeah, a big part of our business is the concert business. We routinely and regularly get high profile concerts year over year. It's not just concerts, it's different events. So for example, the US gymnastics trials, the women's trials will be held here in July of 2016 as a lead-in to the Olympics. They were here in 2012. It's a repeat event. We're having three Garth Brooks concerts here in two weeks. He originally put two shows on sale. The man was so high, we added a third for a Sunday night. Those events keep coming back. U2 is here for two events back in May, two nights back to back. And Oprah Winfrey, who did a talking tour, if you will, of six US arenas, she chose SAP Center as one of them last November. So it's more than just the NHL team. It's recreational ice hockey through Shark's Ice. It's the concerts and the like. And this past year, we added even more events. This year, we're planning to have about 200 events in the building, 41 Shark's games, plus hopefully many playoff games. But we also moved the Shark's top AHL affiliate from Worcester, Massachusetts, to San Jose. And they're playing here the San Jose Barracuda. So we're one of two or three teams in NHL that have their top development team playing in the same city, in our case, in the same building. And even that has a technical tie-in because of presenting sponsor of the Barracuda, the San Jose Barracuda is Barracuda Networks, a leading technology company here in the Bay Area. And now you have the cube here. And now we have the cube. Oprah Winfrey's here, the cube's here. Jeff, we got to work on our game. Oprah's in town too. How many people are here? Pretty empty back there for the cube, but we're live. So we'll work on our game. Maybe we can fill the seats. Okay, I got to ask you about entertainment because you're in the entertainment business. Shark's is one element of it. What are you guys doing with the digital transformation? What's your vision? What are some of your priorities? Because it is experiences outside of the venue. You own the venue, you have a lot of gravity here, you've got Brooks, you've got you too, all these concerts, all these events. Your fan base is now virtually connected. And we were talking before we went on live about Snapchat and the experiences of fans talking to other fans here and getting a window into the event. Talk about that transformation. How is that changing the dynamic for you? Very much so. The good thing is that it allows us to communicate directly to our fans. So we're less reliable on newspapers, for example. So that allows us the ability to control the messaging to respond in real time to our fans. So when an issue pops up, we'll hear about it through Instagram or Twitter or whatever the case may be. And we're able to respond very quickly. So it allows the ability to create more value for your customers. It's a direct business model. Exactly, direct business model. Season ticket holders are alike because you're able to respond in real time and address their needs. And this happens on an ongoing basis. Small issues or big issues? What's the big thing that's been magnified for you that's been a learning over the past few years? I know we talked a little bit about this the last time we talked about it. I want to go there again. As we look back today and looking back and to look forward, what has been magnified for you as a learning in all this change in technology and fan experiences and physical structures and all the stuff happened? What's the big thing? How important Wi-Fi is? As soon as you upgrade your Wi-Fi, it's outdated, right? So that's in constant upgrade mode to improve the Wi-Fi. And you want customers to come to games, they want to have access to their phones. You have to provide the ability for them to access their phones and the technology on their phones for them to enjoy a hockey game and also the content on their phones. So that's one aspect. But overall, the value proposition for seasoned ticket holders. It wins and losses are important, they're critically important, but seasoned ticket holders are looking for a value proposition from the team, whether it's extra benefits, whether it's the Wi-Fi, whether it's more interaction with the players and the team, unique access items, so forth and so on. So those are things that are primarily our focus is creating more value for seasoned ticket holders. Some of that comes in a digital format, other of it just comes in better and improved customer service. You know, Wi-Fi is in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs now from what I've heard, it's a critical, critical name. It's between food and water. Shelter, I think shelter's laid below that. Share with the fans what's going on with the Sharks. Use the opportunity to share with them your vision, what you guys are doing, some of the things, and some of the exciting things that are happening here that they may not know about. There are a lot of exciting things that are happening here and it all starts with ownership. Ownership, like I said, Hostel Plotner, tremendous hockey fan, big support of the franchise. He grew up in Germany watching the old Soviet Red Army teams play and then we saw guys like Sergey Makarov and Igor Larionov play for the Sharks. He couldn't believe it, because he used to watch them on TV with the Red Army teams. But his passion for the team transcends our entire organization and his commitment to this organization in the last six months is unheralded. First of all, we moved our minor league team from Worcester to San Jose. We had to build a locker room for them at Sharks Ice, a four million dollar project. Most importantly though, we renewed our extension with the city of San Jose for 10 additional years. Our owner did not want to go anywhere else. He did not want to leverage the city for a new arena. He did not want to entertain going to San Francisco or elsewhere in the Bay Area. He loves this arena and he says the whole concept of new stadium, he says this publicly, is an American thing. Bill was talking about earlier how is every 20 years baseball stadium becoming outdated. This arena is 22 years and going strong and he's very happy with our arena and his commitment was to the city of San Jose and his commitment was to stay here. But beyond that, we have a new coaching staff. We invested in free agents during the off season. So our key is to continue to invest and grow. But for the consumer, we've also added more sales elements to our franchise. We've hired 40 to 45 people in the last six months all geared towards sales, service and marketing. We need to super serve our fans. And in this environment that's very competitive, the Giants have won three World Series, the Warriors have won, the Niners are here in a new venue, the Earthquakes are here in a new venue. We need to super serve our fan and I found in my first two years as COO that our staff was basically understaffed relative to other sports teams and other teams around the NHL. So we're... It's culture of winning now. It's culture of winning. Culture of winning, culture of serving, culture of adding value. And that's something that we are building upon our great foundation here and trying to continue to accomplish. John, thanks for coming back on theCUBE. Really appreciate you hosting us. Thanks so much. Thanks, John. John Tertura, the COO of the Sharps. We'll be right back with more after this short break. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching.