The San Francisco Giants have moved their disaster recovery system for critical data, files and video to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
From playing competitive baseball to strengthening its ties with the San Francisco community, from remaining true to its commitment to diversity and inclusion, to increasing the financial value of the franchise, the Giants have lofty goals. Using OCI is critical to achieving them, according to Bill Schlough, Chief Information Officer for the San Francisco Giants.
The team has more than 200 terabytes of video that it uses for scouting and player development, but also for in-stadium programming, according to Schlough. That video is stored on OCI for backup and disaster recovery purposes, but Schlough says he expects the team to increase the amount and scope of cloud computing it uses.
The Giants, like most baseball teams, use a combination of video and analytics to measure player performances and to evaluate amateur and pro players not on the team, as well as for training purposes. It also uses video for entertainment at the stadium and through interactive devices.
Schlough noted that the increased usage and resolution of video is leading to a greater need for storage and compute capacity in the cloud.
“Higher quality video is driving the need for more storage. Then the question is, where do you keep it? You probably want to have some that’s real-time accessible,” he says. And while much of the video processing and analytics has traditionally been done on-site, people are increasingly working from remote locations, and “you want your video editors and producers to be working with that video, so you need it in the cloud.”
This increasing reliance on video technology across all of baseball puts greater emphasis on getting more benefits from the technology than competitors.
“It’s no longer about just moving to the cloud and Oracle’s in the cloud. Oracle has to be the best provider in the cloud because everybody’s in the cloud going forward,” he said.
Schlough said the Giants, which have been using cloud technology for more than 15 years, switched to OCI from AWS because it is faster and less expensive.
“Being in the cloud is table stakes across all aspects of our operation,” Schlough said. “We need to have the flexibility to be able to spin up servers as needed and [spin up] compute capacity. So whether it’s making better decisions with respect to artificial intelligence or analytics or another technology, or whether we have the right food at the right price in the ballpark, we have to be in the cloud to be able to do that.”
From the hot corner to hot dogs
“We want to be spending our time on our strategic objectives, propelling the business forward, helping make the team on the field more successful, and helping enhance the fan experience, and the Oracle cloud enables us to do that,” he said.
The Giants switched out its point-of-sale system, which was only three years old, to Oracle MICROS Simphony Cloud POS, because payment systems have evolved quickly and the organization needed to make it easier for customers to order and pay for food, drinks, and other concession items.
Oracle’s cloud-based system will also make it easier for the organization to determine if it has the right mix of products available in the right quantities and will allow the team to change prices more nimbly to support promotions throughout the season.
Schlough said the Giants will use cloud technology to access and analyze data from a variety of touchpoints – from the POS screens to smartphones people use to make payments – to help them gain a better understanding of what people are buying, when they are buying it, which concession stand they are using, and, to the extent possible, which customer is making that purchase. The team will use this information to help them reach its rich variety of customers and involve them more closely with the team, whether that’s through video stories about individual players or having the right kind of food at the ballpark on a given night.
Schlough said the Giants goals include winning the World Series, of course, but also strengthening its culture through diversity and inclusion, strengthening its roots in the community, increasing the financial value of the franchise, and “ensuring we’re exceptional today with an eye on being extraordinary tomorrow.”
Schlough said his job is to ensure the organization is using technology to support those five top-line objectives. “Cloud computing enables our organization to be more nimble, in a more cost-effective manner that allows us to focus less on maintaining our infrastructure and more on how can we leverage data analytics, technology to achieve these objectives.”