 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We're coming to you live from the show floor of Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia, and we're welcoming to theCUBE for the first time Adam Jones, the Chief Revenue Officer of the Miami Marlins. Adam, it's great to have you on theCUBE. Pleasure to join you both today. So baseball fans, White Sox, San Francisco Giants, Miami Marlins, always cool to talk sports and technology when we can bring those two things together. I think the San Francisco Giants and the Miami Marlins might have something in common right now, but regardless of the standings, everybody wants to go to a game. You have to deliver, as Chief Revenue Officer, a great fan experience. You got to make sure all the vendors are there to deliver what those fans want, regardless of the standings. People still want to go to the games. Talk to us a little bit about your role as the CRO of the Miami Marlins, how long you've been doing it, and then we'll get into what you're doing with Citrix. Sure, so join the Marlins 18 months ago as part of new ownership and the new leadership team brought in to reset the standard for what the Miami Marlins organization could be. We want to be a world-class sport entertainment enterprise. That means we're going to evolve beyond a traditional baseball team and ballpark, 26 years into the history of the franchise, eight years into the operating rights of a ballpark, and there's a lot of work to be done around those two assets, but as we take the organization forward, we want to continue to broaden that enterprise to focus on more sport and entertainment offerings. So Chief Revenue Officer, we don't get many Chief Revenue Officers at a technology conference. Hope, make the connection. What, you're a busy person. What made you take time out of your schedule to come to Citrix synergy? Well, I think it's indicative of the culture we're building with an organization that we're putting data at the very center of our culture. We're going to make informed and timely decisions and we need our technology to enable that culture. And so when it came to where we were going to align our IT group and it's a group that has built out a very robust on-prem infrastructure over the past seven years, following the opening of Marlins Park, the alignment under strategy, which was my initial title coming in and now Chief Revenue Officer, as I took on more responsibility for the business side of the organization, was a strategic decision to make sure that the infrastructure was meeting the requirements of the organization as we rapidly evolve what our priorities are and what we need in order to deliver on their very aggressive and lofty expectations for the organization. So this morning during the keynote, we heard a lot about the digital workplace, the experience, the employee experience being really critical for any type of organization's digital transformation. I just thought it was a really interesting viewpoint because we go to a lot of tech shows here at theCUBE all over the world and we don't often talk about employee experience or even culture as a leading edge indicator of how successful a digital transformation is going to be, but employee experience is really critical to any business because whether those employees are interacting with seven to 10 apps a day based on their job or they're interacting with your other end users, in your case, Marlins fans, making sure those employees are productive, have what they need in a personalized way is critical. Talk to us about what the employee experience means for the Marlins and also as an indicator on the revenue side. Absolutely, so we have an evolving workforce. It's very young across a very diverse enterprise of activities. What we've been able to do in partnership with Citrix since day one of the ballpark where we went from an organization of roughly 100, 150 employees around the team to 300 plus across the team in the ballpark is build out an infrastructure that was very light in terms of hardware, focused very much on the digital workspace, keeps us very nimble, allows us to deploy capital in areas that we see tremendous value back in terms of application and utility. So as we continue to make our workforce more mobile, ask them to deliver and work at a higher rate of speed, we need to arm them with the tools that allow them to perform those roles in the office, out of the office, engage beyond more just than an 81-date transactional relationship across Marlins baseball, but how across 12 months out of the year in creating that 365-day touch point, they still have tools and access in order to create those memories, those engagements that we want with the market. So talking about customer experience, Marlin baseball is more than just the 300 employees. It is your partners, it's all of your contractors. When I go to a ballpark, I don't see, you know, Mark the hot dog vendor, I see Mark the guy that works for the Marlins. And my user experience, my customer experience needs to be excellent across that. As CRIO, that's part of your responsibility ensuring that the whole Marlin family is presented as one unity. Talk to us about from not just a user experience perspective, but also security expectations of how you need to make that real for your customer. Sure, on the experience side, what we're doing is resetting the standard not only for Marlins and for South Florida, but the industry as a whole. We've brought on a lot of great talent to the organization from across the industry that knows what's worked, what hasn't across our peers. We're applying that, we're challenging conventional practice, trying to get out in front of the curve as to what is going to be the future of a game day experience, what is a sport entertainment enterprise more holistically. And so as a result, we have to arm our employees with those tools that will allow them to engage consistently across all the touchpoints with our fans, with our partners. Try not to centralize data to the point where only a select few have and feel informed and empowered to make decisions and take action, but disseminate that information, empower everyone to deliver consistently across all of those touchpoints. On the security side, being a public interest entity, we're vulnerable, we're a target, there's plenty of precedent around the type of activity that these types of organizations can be prone to try to have to address. And so security is a number one priority of ours to make sure that the IP we're creating maintains and stays ours, as well as all of the information that we're collecting around our customers, around our players, stays within that secure environment as well. So if I think about going to a baseball game, which I love, there's so many sellable moments there. Whether I'm in the stands and I want to go buy food and beverage or I want a new hat or some sort of merchandise from my nephew or something, you have a CRO, you've got all these different sellable moments, not just in the ballpark, in the physical experience, but even online. So having this kind of cohesive opportunity to sell not just tickets, but food and beverage, merchandise, in person, on mobile, on a desktop, it's got to be a critical part of your strategy. Talk about the alignment with yourself and you said a lot of your IT guys have phone calls as you're here, but I imagine that those experiences are essential, that you have the right foundation and technological foundation to deliver sellable moments that deliver. That's right, so the ecosystem of sport is a fairly diverse one from the ticketing transaction to all of the in ballpark touch points. To what we're trying to create is that 12 month relationship with a fan. So that goes into creating a lot of content and how we distribute that content in order to continue to earn that engagement well beyond 81 plus states of baseball. And the technology behind there in terms of our storage and our accessibility is what allows us to begin to personalize and tailor not only those core traditional transactions in touch points of sport, but how we've begun transition into more of that broader entertainment enterprise and making sure that we can deliver those as personalized and tailored as we can. So there was another Chicago team that showed the age of baseball. It was over a hundred years before they won a- Another Chicago team. Yeah, another Chicago team that won a championship. So baseball has a lot of tradition. You're in a unique opportunity that you're coming into a new ownership, but still baseball has traditions that are hard to compete against. So let's talk about what are some of the cultural changes and opportunities that you see that baseball needs to engage in where technology can help? Sure. Well, I think an interesting thought around baseball and where it's been scrutinized as whether it be pace of play or number of games of not keeping up with the times, not being as snackable, short form consumption as other sporting content, as everything tracks that way, baseball starts to differentiate itself in terms of the ability to create a very distinct and differentiated experience to a millennial, to a family, to an older consumer who has grown up with the traditions of baseball. And so while baseball needs to continue to innovate and modernize, there's actually this interesting equilibrium as to how much it continues to challenge those traditions that differentiate it from many of other points of contact and where it should continue to preserve those elements to hold what has been generational type engagement. You know, a great example of that is mlb.com and being able to watch a game anywhere. Baseball does an amazing job of embracing digital transformation at least in baseball. One of the things that we talked about or that David talked about on stage today is the $7 trillion opportunity. That's big, even in baseball numbers. Like baseball, there's no bigger sporting numbers than baseball, but $7 trillion is opportunity. What are you excited about coming out of this show when you look at some of the potential gained efficiencies from some of the automation announcements that were made today? For our organization while there has been significant investment in infrastructure, great collaboration with Citrix up until this point. The exciting transformation us is our migration into more of a hybrid cloud environment which is going to allow us to onboard a number of new applications, tools for our sales team, our service team, our game presentation groups to continue to innovate and challenge how they've gone to market in the past. And having Citrix as a partner that has that environment for us to step into, one gives us a ton of assurance in taking that next step and having someone that continues to bring us new tools within that environment as well, so our ability to collaborate across the organization. I'd say we've only just skimmed the surface as to the true capability and power of a lot of the tools we've had in place and very excited about unlocking the true power and potential of that environment moving forward. So this is your second season with the Merlins. You spent 15 years at PWC and before we went live, I thought, that must have been a pretty big change going from PWC to Major League Baseball, but you actually have quite a history in sports. Tell us a little bit about that and maybe some of the similarities between Major League Baseball as an industry to other industries that kind of surprised you. Sure, organizations couldn't be different, more different in terms of profile and setup. What I did day to day, advising across sport and entertainment, leading the sports practice at PWC positioned me for this incredible opportunity or challenge that is the Miami Marlins and what we're building in this aggressive vision we've set as to how we're going to reset the standard and become world-class as an enterprise. PWC and the history with the firm and professional services gave me a unique perspective as to how to take on many of the challenges we have, had the opportunity working across sport to really understand what works, what doesn't, so that we can avoid some of those missteps that others who have taken on this road map ahead of us have encountered. The breadth of infrastructure that a firm of PWC size also gives me a little bit more of a lens as to what the power and scale of a large organization can deliver in more of a small mid-size business form and not accept size or employee base as a constraint as to the types of tools and the sophistication of our technology that we can deploy within a sports organization. Well, Adam, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon talking about how you are helping to make big positive impacts for the Miami Marlins. We appreciate your time. I enjoyed it, thank you. Go MLB. All right, for Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from our first day of coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.