 From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here with theCUBE coverage for two days. We're wrapping up, getting down to day one in the books for the Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here at Miami Beach, the Fulton Blue Hotel. I'm personally excited for this next guest because I'm a huge Red Sox fan, even though I got moved out to California. Giant's is in different areas. The National League's different than Maryland. Still at my heart and mind with the Red Sox. And we're here with an industry veteran, seasoned professional in IT and data, Brian Shield, Red Sox, Boston Red Sox, Vice President of Technology in IT. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Great to be here. So congratulations on the rings. Since I moved out of town, Red Sox win their World Series, break the curse of the Bambino. Hey, we appreciate that. Thank you. You guys want me back. So you got to show. Yeah, so for, maybe I'll put this one out for the, there's someone can zoom in on this. I don't know which camera is the good one. It's one here. So there you go. So World Series champs are at least for another week. Yeah, bummer about this year, that you just couldn't get it done, but that's, you know, good team at the top. And sweet, you know. Again, things move on. New regime, new GM going to come on board. So, but in general, Red Sox, you know, storied franchise, love it there. Fenway Park, the cathedral of baseball parks. Definitely. And you're seeing that, that just play out now standard. So just a great place to go. We have tickets there. So I got to ask you, technology, sports, really is modernized faster than I think any category. And certainly cybersecurity forced to modernize because of the threats, but sports, you got a business to run, not just IT and making the planes run on time, scouts, money, whatever. You got fans, yeah. Stadium, you know, opportunities. Club management, scouts are out there. So you got business, team, fans. And data is a big part of it. That's part of your career. Tell us about what the cutting edge innovation is at the Red Sox these days. Well, so I think, you know, baseball in general is a shoe educated. It's a very evolving kind of environment. I mean, historically, I think people really sort of relish the nostalgia of sports. And Fenway Park being sort of as historic as it is, was probably the pinnacle of that in some respects. But, you know, Red Sox have always been leaders in baseball analytics, you know, and everyone's pretty familiar with Moneyball and, you know, Brad Pitt and whatnot. Is that your story? You turned down the GM job? I'm told it is. I don't know if I fully, you know, embedded that question, but the, but you know, so, you know, over the last, you know, six, seven years, you know, we've really turned our attention to sort of leveraging sort of technology across the business, right? So not just baseball analytics and how we do scouting, which continues to evolve at a very rapid pace, but also, as you point out, running a better business, understanding our fans, understanding fan behavior, you know, understanding the stadium. Stadium is a lot of challenges around running an effective stadium. And in first and foremost, all of us is, is really ensuring it's a great fan experience. And so, you know, whether it's artificial intelligence or IoT technologies or, you know, you know, 5G or the latest Wi-Fi, all those things are coming up at Fenway Park, you know, you and I talked earlier about, we're about to break ground for a new theater. So a live theater on the outside of Beyond the Bleachers type of thing. So that'll be, you know, 5,400-seat arena, 200 live performances a year, and with eSports, you know, complimenting it. And so it just gives you an example of just how fast baseball is sort of transitioning. And the theater, is that going to be blown out from where that parking garage is, structure, and going towards... Yeah, so a corner of Lansdown and Ipswich, if you think of that sort of corner back there, for those that are familiar with Fenway area type of thing. So it's going to be a very big, big change, and you'll see the difference too from, you know, within the ballpark. So you'll now, I think we'll lose a couple of rows of the bleachers, and that'll be replaced with sort of another gathering area for fans and things like that on the back end of that theater. So it'll be a great experience, and I think it really speaks to sort of our ability to sort of, you know, to think of Fenway more as a destination, as a venue, as a complimentary experience. We want people to come to the area to enjoy sports and to enjoy entertainment and things like that. You know, Brian, the consumerization of IT has been kicked around in the last decade. That was a big buzzword. Now the blending of a physical event and digital has certainly consumed the world. Now that you start to see that dynamic, you speak through a theater, that's a physical space. But digital is also a big part of kind of that complimentary, it's not mutually exclusive for each other. They're integrated business models. So therefore, the technology has to be seamless. The data has to be available, and it's got to be secure. Well, the data's got to be ubiquitous, right? I mean, you don't want to, I mean, if we're going to have fans attending theater and then you're going to go to Fenway Park, or they leave a game and they go to some other event, or they attend a tour of Fenway Park, and beyond sort of the, maybe the traditional, what people might think about is sort of when they think about baseball and Fenway Park, you know, we have 10 to 12 concerts a year. You know, we'll host Spartan games, you know? This Christmas, I'm sorry, Christmas 2020, we now have sort of the Fenway Bowl. So we'll be hosting sort of the AAC, ACC, you know, championship games there with ESPN. And so, you know, there are games, hockey games, you know, obviously we have Liverpool, you know, soccer being held there and things. So it's much more of a destination of venue for us and how we leverage all the wonderful things about Fenway Park and how we modernize, how we get basically the best of what makes Fenway Park as great as it is, yet as modern as we can make it, we're appropriate to sort of create a great Fen experience. It's a tough balance between balancing the brand and having things on brand as well. Sure. Does that come into your job a lot around ITC saying being on brand, not kind of tearing down the old? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, our CEOs are in leadership team. You mean, it's not success for us if you, if you pay into the audience, everyone's looking at their phone, right? You know, that's not what we aspire to or we aspire to, you know, leverage technology and sort of simplify people's experience of how do you get to the ballpark? You know, how do I park? How do I get, you know, if I want to buy, you know, concessioned or merchandise? How do I do it easily and simply, how do we supplement that experience with maybe additional data that you've never had before? You know, and things like that. So we're doing a lot of different testing right now with whether it's like 40 technologies and, or, you know, how we can understand sort of watch a play from different dimensions or, you know, AI and be able to, perhaps, see sort of the skyline of Boston since 1912 when Fenway Park launched, you know, on first making it become effective and things. And so, you know, we sort of see all these technologies as supplemental materials of really kind of making it sort of a holistic experience for a family. You know, in Las Vegas, they have a section of Las Vegas where they have all their test beds, 5G, they call it 5G. It's really, you know, evolution, E, big 5G, but it's a sandbox. One of the challenges that you guys have in Boston, I know from a constrained standpoint, basically, is you don't have a lot of space. How do you sandbox new technologies? And what are some of the things that are cool that people might not know about that are being sandboxed? So, one, how do you do it effectively? And then, what are some of the cool things that you guys are looking at, or things they might not know about that would be interesting? Yeah, so Fenway Park, you know, I mean, we struggle, as you know, with a little bit with that footprint. You know, I mean, honestly, I walk in some of these large stadiums and I get instant jealousy relative to just, you know, the amount of space that people have to work with and things, you know. But we have a great relationship with our partners. So we really, you know, partner, I think, particularly well with key partners like Verizon and others. You know, so we now have 5G partially implemented Fenway Park. We expect to have it sort of fully live, come open and gain next year. So we're really excited about that. We hope to have a new version of Wi-Fi, the latest version of Wi-Fi available for the second half of the year. After all separate, probably after the season's over, but before our bowl game, hopefully. And so we're looking at some really interesting ways that we can tease it out. That bowl game, we're really trying to, really kind of use it as an opportunity, the Fenway Bowl, as an opportunity to really make it kind of a high-tech bowl. So we're looking at ways of maybe doing everything from hackathons to kind of a pre-e-gaming sort of event to some interesting sort of fan-experiential opportunities and things like that. Get a lot of nerds at MIT, Northeastern, BU, Bentley, Babson, all the schools in the area. Yeah, and so we'll be reaching out to colleges and we'll be reaching out to our, the ACC and AACs as well. And so what we can do to kind of create sort of a really fun experience and capitalize on sort of the evolving role of eSports and sort of the role that technology can play in the future. I want to get to the eSports. I was saying about I want to just get the plug in for Acronis, we're here at their global cyber summit. You flew down for it, giving some keynote speeches and talks around security, security company, data protection to cyber protection. It is a data problem, not a storage appliance problem. It's a data problem holistically. You get that, you've been in the business for a long time. What is the security kind of posture that you guys have? Obviously, you want to protect the data, protect privacy, but you got a business. You have people that work with you, supply chain, complex, but yet dynamic, always on environment. That's a great question. So it's a city of all things you indicated. You know, Majority Baseball, first and foremost, does an outstanding job. So last, probably last four plus years, ML Majority Baseball's had a cyber security program that all the clubs partake in. So all 30 clubs are active participants in the program. They basically help sort of build out a suite of tools as well as sort of the ability to kind of monitor, help participate in the monitoring of sort of a lot of our cyber security assets and logs. And that's really elevated significantly sort of our posture in terms of security. We supplement that quite a bit, and a good example of that is Acronis. Acronis for us represents the ability for us to be able to kind of respond to certain potential threats like ransomware and other things, as well as frankly, what's wonderful about a tool like this is that it allows us to sort of also solve other problems, making our scouts more efficient, and we've got these 125 scout scattered around the globe. And these guys are the lifeblood of our, of the success of our business. And so when they have a problem if they're in Venezuela or the Dominican or someplace else in Southeast Asia, like getting them up and running as quickly as we can, be able to consume their video assets and other things as they're scouting prospects, and we use Acronis for those solutions. And so it's great to kind of have a partner who can sort of go kind of double down as a cyber partner as well, as sort of someone helps out. And we'll bring their phones into the stadium too. So those are end points now connecting to your network. Definitely. And as you pointed out before, we've got great partnerships, you know, we have got a great concession relationship with Irmar, and they operate in the future, they'll be operating up our infrastructure. So we're in the point of rolling out all new point of sale terminals this off season. And so we're excited about that. Cause we think for the first time, it really allows us to build a very comprehensive, very secure environment, you know, for both ourselves and for all the touch points to fans. You know, you have a very stellar career. I noticed you were at Scutter Investments back in the 80s, very cutting edge firm, FTD. That set the whole standard of connecting retailers. Again, huge scale play. You can see the data kind of coming out of the way you've been a CIO, CTO, the EVP CIO at the Weather Channel and the weather.com. Again, first mover, kind of pioneer. And then now the Red Sox pioneer. So I got to ask you the modernization question. Red Sox certainly have been very cutting edge certainly under the last two owners. And the previous Henry's a good one doing more and more. Has the business model of baseball evolved? Cause you guys are a franchise, right? You operate under the franchise for the MLBaseball and you have jurisdictions. So has digital blurred the lines between what advanced media unit can do? You've got communities developing outside. I watched the games in California. I'm not in there, but I'm present digitally. So how has the business model flexed with the innovation of baseball? That's a great question. So I mean, first off, the relationship between clubs like ours and MLB, you know, continued evolve. We have a new commissioner, a relatively new commissioner. And I think kind of the whole like one baseball model that he's been promoting, I think has been great. You know, I mean, the boundary sometimes between digital assets and how we innovate and things like that is continues to evolve. I mean, majorly baseball and the technology groups and product groups that support majorly baseball, you know, have been a fantastic partner of ours. I mean, if you look at some of the innovations with stat cast and some of the other types of things that fans are now becoming more familiar with and when they see sort of how fast a runner goes or how far a run goes and other sort of things, these kinds of capabilities, you know, are on the surface, but even like mobile applications to make use for fans to come into ball parks and things like that. Really, what we see is really our platforms for the future touch points to all of our customers, you know, but you're right. It gets complicated streaming videos and you know, people hadn't thought of it before. And Latin America, huge audience with the Red Sox got great players down there. That's outside the jurisdiction, I think of the franchise agreement, isn't it? Well, it's complicated, you know? I mean, as this past summer, we played two games in England, right? So we enjoyed two games in London. Sadly, we lost the Yankees on both of those, but an amazing experience and major baseball really hats off to those guys what they did to kind of pull that together. You mentioned stat cast. Every year when I meet with Andy Jassy at AWS, you know, he's a sports fan. We love to talk sports. That's a huge kind of shows the power of data and cloud computing. No doubt. How do you guys interface with stat cast? Is that an Amazon thing? Do they come to you? Are they leveraging dimensions, camera angles? How does that all work? I mean, are you guys involved in that? Or is it separate? Yeah, so stat cast is just one of many data feeds as you can imagine. You know, one of the things that major baseball does is all that type of data is readily available to every club. So every club has access to the data. The real, you know, competitive differentiator, if you will, is how you use it internally. Like how your analysts can consume that data. We have a baseball system we call Beacon. You know, we retired Carmine, if you're familiar with the old days of Carmine. So we retired Carmine a few years ago with Beacon. And Beacon for us represents sort of our opportunity to effectively sort of, you know, collapse all this information into a decision-making environment that allows us to, we hopefully, to kind of make the best decisions. So we know those things. Well, I love that you're answering all these questions. I really appreciate it. The one I really want to get into is obviously the fan experience we talked about that. No talent on the field means no World Series. So you've got to always be constantly replenishing the talent pool, farm system, recruiting, scouting, all these things go on. They're instrumental. Data's a key driver. What new innovations that the casual fan or IT person might be interested in around what's going on around scouting and understanding the asset of a human being, a human resource? Well, some of this gets, you know, highly competitive, you know, confidential and things. But I think at a macro level, I mean, I think as you start to see both in the minor leagues and in some portions of the major leagues, wearable technologies, you know, I mean, I think beyond just sort of player performance information that you would see traditionally with, you might associate with like Billy Bean and things like that with Moneyball, which has evolved obviously considerably since those days. You know, I mean, understanding sort of player wellness, understanding sort of how to get the most out of a player and understanding sort of be able to kind of predict potential injuries and accelerate recoveries and, you know, be able to use all this technology where appropriate to really kind of help sort of maximize the value of player performance. I mean, David Ortiz, you know, I don't know where we would have been in 2018 without, you know, David, you know, type of thing. And, but like, you know- The longevity of a player to- Yeah, absolutely. Like they're in the zone. I mean, we're right now to tell you, if you're sleeping well, or we'll manage to have a visual in the zone, don't pull them out. He can go and extra anything. Well, I mean, they have a lot of data. I mean, we don't, we currently don't provide to let data to the clubhouse. I mean, you know, and so if you're in the dugout of that information is in all these readily available type of thing, but players know all this information and they, you know, I mean, we continue to evolve it. And at the end of the day, though, it's finding the balancing act between data and the aptitudes of our coaching staff and our managers to really make the best decision. Brian, final question for you. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now? And besides the fan having a great experience, is that Siri kind of touched on that? What's the coolest thing that you're excited about that you're working on from a tech perspective that you think is going to be game changing or interesting? I think our cloud strategy coming up in the future, it's still a little bit early stage, but our hope would be to kind of, you know, have clarity about that in the next couple of months, I think is going to be a game changer for us. I think having, you know, we enjoy great relationship, you know, with Dell EMC, and yet we also do work in the cloud. And so being able to kind of leverage the best of both of those, to be able to kind of create sort of a compelling experience for both fans, for both player, baseball operations, as well as sort of running an efficient business, I think is really kind of what we're all about. I mean, you guys are the poster child for Hybrid Cloud, because you've got Core, Data Center, IoT, and... No doubt. So it's over, it's exciting times, and it's, and we're very fortunate that with our relationship and organizations like Dell and EMC, we have leading edge technologies. And so it's, and so we're excited about where that can go and kind of what that can mean and, you know, so it'll be a big step in our journey. Okay, so two personal questions from me as a fan. One, is there really a money counting room like in the movie, The Town? Do they count money on a big stack of dollar bills? Well, I'm sure there is. I personally haven't visited it. I know it's not in the room that they would sort of, you know, tell you it is on the movie. Yeah, they won't tell you the location. And finally, can theCUBE get press passes to cover the games next to Nessan? Talk tech. We'll see if we can do it work. We can talk Facebook, we'll talk about bandwidth. Right now it's the level five connectivity. We're looking good on the pipes. Yeah, we'll give you a tech tour. And you guys can sort of help articulate all that to the fans. Thank you so much. Brian Shield, vice president of technology at Boston Red Sox. Here talking about security and also the complications and challenges, but the mega opportunities around what digital and fan experiences are with the physical product like baseball encapsulates kind of the digital revolution that's happening. It's theCUBE covering it here in Miami. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back after this short break.