We will now explore how the 2018 Ryder Cup match between European and US golf players places a unique combination of requirements on its operators and suppliers. As a result, the IT solutions needed to make the Ryder Cup better than ever for its 250,000 live spectators and sponsors will set a new benchmark for future mobile sports events.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to describe the
challenges and solutions for making the latest networks and applications
operate in a highly distributed environment is Michael Cole,
Chief Technology Officer for the European Tour and Ryder Cup. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Cole: The
Ryder Cup is a biannual golf event, contested by teams representing Europe and the
United States. It is without doubt the most prestigious team event in golf and
arguably the world’s most compelling sporting contest in the world.
Gardner: What
do you mean by location services as pertains to the Ryder Cup? How challenging
is that to manage?
Gardner: What
you accomplish at the Ryder Cup will set the standard for going further for the
broader European Tour. Tell us about the European Tour and how this sets the
stage for extending your success across a greater distribution of golfing
events.
Cole: Golf
is unique because it’s a greenfield site, with a unique set of challenges. No
two golf courses are the same in the world. The technology platform gives us a
modular approach. It gives us the agility to deploy what is necessary where and
when we need.
But equally, I am very pleased
in the way that we are working with our partner, HPE, and its range of
technology partners. In fact, we have adopted an eight-phase approach through
staging, through design, and through configuration off site, on site. We do
tech rehearsals.
The third aspect, which is
really the answer to your question, is how we utilize that intelligence and
that insight to create real value for our sponsors. The days of sponsors
thinking activation was branding and the hospitality program are long gone.
They are now far more sophisticated in their approach and their expectations
are taken to a new level. And as a rights holder we have an obligation to help
them be successful in that activation and achieve their return on investment (ROI).
Cole: As
you would expect, we have a series of financial measurements around
merchandizing, ticket revenues, sponsorship revenue, et cetera. But the technology
platform now gives us the capability to go far beyond that. Critical to success
will be the satisfaction; the satisfaction of spectators, the satisfaction of
players, and the satisfaction of our commercial family.
Here are some excerpts:
 |
| Cole |
As such, it really is our blue-ribbon
event and requires a huge temporary infrastructure to serve 250,000 spectators
-- over 50,000 super fans every day of the event -- but also media, journalists,
players, and their entourages.
Gardner: Why
do you refer this as blue-ribbon? What is it about the US versus Europe aspect
that makes it so special?
Cole: It’s
special for the players, really. These professionals play the majority of their
schedule in the season as individuals. The Ryder Cup gives them the opportunity
to play as a team -- and that is special for the players. You can see that in the
passion of representing either the United States or Europe.
Gardner: What
makes the Ryder Cup such a difficult problem from this digital delivery and
support perspective? Why are the requirements for a tournament-wide digital architecture so extreme?
Cole:
Technology deployment in golf is very challenging. We have to bear in mind that
every course essentially is a greenfield site. We very rarely return to the
same course on two occasions. Therefore, how you deploy technology in an
environment that is 150 acres large – or the equivalent of 85 football pitches --
is challenging. And we must do that as a temporary overlay for four days of
operation, or three days for the Ryder Cup, operationally leading in, deploying
our technology, and then bumping out very quickly onto the next event.
We typically deploy up to five
different infrastructures: one for television; another for the tournament
television big digital screens in the fan zones on the course; the scoring
network has its own infrastructure; the public Wi-Fi, and, of course, we have
the back-of-house operational IT infrastructure as well. It’s a unique challenge
in terms of scale and complexity.
Gardner: It also
exemplifies the need for core data capabilities that are deeply integrated with
two-way, high-volume networks and edge devices. How do you tie the edge and the
core together effectively?
Data delivery leads the way
Cole: The technology
has a critical role to play for us. We at the European Tour lead the
transformation in global golf -- very much putting in data at the heart of our
sports to create the right level of content and insight for our key
stakeholders. This is critical.
For us this is about adopting
the Hewlett
Packard Enterprise (HPE) Intelligent Edge
network and approach, which ensures the processing of data, location-based services, and the distribution of content that all takes place at the point of
interaction with our key stakeholders, i.e., at the edge and on the golf course.
Cole: One
of the key benefits that the infrastructure will provide is an understanding of
people and their behavior. So, we will be able to track the crowds around the
course. We will be able to use that insight in terms of behaviors to create
value -- both for ourselves in terms of operational delivery, but also for our
sponsors by delivering a better understanding of spectators and how they can
convert those spectators into customers.
Big BYOD challenges
Gardner: This
is also a great example of how to support a bring-your-own-device
(BYOD) challenge. Spectators may prefer to use their cellular
networks, but those aren’t always available in these particular locations. What
is it about the types of devices that these fans are using that also provides a
challenge?
Cole: One
of the interesting things that we recently found is the correlation between
devices and people. So whilst we are expecting more than 51,000 people per day
at the Ryder Cup, the number of devices could easily be double or triple that.
Typically, people these days
will have two to three devices. So when we consider the Ryder Cup week [in September] and the fact that we will have more than 250,000 people attending –
it’s even more devices. This is arguably the biggest BYOD environment on the
planet this year, and that’s a challenge.
Gardner: What are
you putting in place so that the end user experience is what they expect?
Cole: I use
the term frictionless. I want the experience to be frictionless. The way
they on-board, the way they access the Wi-Fi -- I want it to be seamless and
easy. It’s critical for us to maximize the number of spectators using the Wi-Fi
infrastructure. It equally becomes a source of data and is useful for
marketing purposes. So the more people that we can get onto the Wi-Fi, convert
them into registering, and then receiving promotional activity – for both us
and our partners -- that’s a key measure of success.
It
is critical for us to maximize the number of spectators using the WiFi
infrastructure. It becomes a source of data and is useful for marketing.
I want the experience to be frictionless.
Cole: This
is without doubt the biggest investment that the European Tour has made in
technology, and particularly for the Ryder Cup. So it is critical for us that the
investment becomes our legacy as well. I am very much looking forward to having
an adoption of technology that will serve our purposes, not only for the Ryder
Cup, not only for this year, but in fact for the next four years, until the
next Ryder Cup cycle.
For me it’s about an
investment in a quadrennial period, and serving those 47 tournaments each year,
and making sure that we can provide a consistency and quality beyond the Ryder
Cup for each of our tournaments across the European Tour schedule.
Gardner: And
how many are there?
Cole: We
will run 47 tournaments in 30 countries, across five continents. Our down
season is just three days. So we are operationally on the go every day, every
week of the year.
Gardner: Many
of our listeners and readers tend to be technologists, so let’s dig into the
geek stuff. Tell us about the solution. How do you solve these scale problems?
Golf in a private cloud
Cole: One
of the critical aspects is to ensure that data is very much at the heart of
everything we do. We need to make sure that we have the topology right, and
that topology clearly is underpinned by the technological platform. We will be
adopting a classic core distribution and access approach.
For the Ryder Cup, we will
have more than 130 switches. In order to provide network ubiquity and overcome
one of our greatest challenges of near 100 percent Wi-Fi coverage across the course,
we will need 700 access switches. So this has scale and scope, but it doesn’t
stop there.
We will essentially be
creating our own private cloud. We will be utilizing the VMware virtual
platform. We will have a number of on-premises servers and that will
be configured across two network corporation centers, with full resiliency and
duplicity between the two.
Having 100 percent
availability is critical for my industry and delivery of golf across the
operational period of three days for Ryder Cup or four days of a traditional
golf tournament. We cannot afford any downtime -- even five minutes is five
minutes too much.
Gardner: Just
to dwell on the edge technology, what is it about the Aruba technology from
HPE that is satisfying your needs, given this extreme situation of
hundreds of acres and hilly terrain and lots of obstacles?
And we can do this with the HPE Aruba platform in a way that gives us true integration, true service management,
and a stack of applications that can better enable us to manage that entire environment.
That includes through the basic management of the infrastructure to security
and on-boarding for the largest BYOD requirements on the planet this year. And it’s
for a range of services that we will integrate into our spectator app to
deliver better value and smarter insights for our commercial family.
Gardner: Tell
us about Michael Cole. How did your background prepare you for such a daunting
undertaking?
Cole: My
background has always been in technology. I spent some 20 years with British Telecom (BT).
More recently I moved into the area of sports and technology, following the London 2012
Olympics. I then worked for technology companies for the Rio 2016 Olympic
Games. I have supported technology companies for the PyeongChang
[South Korea] 2018 Winter Games, and also for the up and coming 2020 Tokyo Games,
as well as the Pan
American Games.
So I have always been
passionate about technology, but increasingly passionate about the use of
technology in sports. What I bring to the European Tour is the broader insight
around multinational global sports and events and bringing that insight into
golf.
Gardner: Where
is the Ryder Cup this year?
Cole: It’s
being held just outside Paris at Versailles, at Le Golf National. And there’s a
couple of things I want to say on this. It's the first time that the European
Tour has been held in Europe outside of United Kingdom since 1997 at Valderrama
in Spain.
The other interesting aspect,
thinking about my background around the Olympics, is actually Le Golf National
is the venue for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games;
in fact, where the event of golf will be held. So, one of my key objectives is
to create a compelling and sustainable legacy for those games in 2024.
Gardner: Let’s
fast-forward to the third week of September 2018. What will a typical day in
the life of Michael Cole be like as you are preparing and then actually
executing on this?
Test-driven tech performance
Cole: Well,
there is no typical day. Every day is very different, and we still have a heavy
schedule on our European Tour, but what is critical is the implementation phase
and the run in to the Ryder Cup.
My team was on site to start
the planning and early deployment some six months ago, in February. The
activity now increases significantly. In the month of June, we took delivery of
the equipment on site and initiated the Technology Operations Center, and in
fact, the Wi-Fi is now live.
We also will adopt one of the
principles from the Olympics in terms of test events, so we will utilize the French Open
as a test event for the Ryder Cup. And this is an important aspect to the
methodology.
I am very pleased with the way we are working with our partner, HPE, and its range of technology partners.
So, the whole thing is very
structured and methodical in terms of the approach as we get closer to the
Ryder Cup in September.
Gardner: We
have looked at this through the lens of technology uniqueness and challenge.
Let’s look at this through the lens of business. How will you know you have
succeeded through the eyes of your sponsors and your organization? It seems to
me that you are going to be charting new ground when it comes to business
models around location, sporting, spectators. What are some of the new
opportunities you hope to uncover from a business model perspective?
Connect, capture, create
Cole: The
platform has three key aspects to it, in my mind. The first one is the ability
to create the concept of a connected golf course, a truly connected course,
with near 100 percent connectivity at all times.
The second element is the
ability to capture data, and that data will drive insights and help us to
understand behavioral patterns of spectators on the course.
Moving from a spectator to a
lead, to a lead to a customer, from customer to an advocate is critical for
them. I believe that our choice of technology for the Ryder Cup and for the
European Tour will help in that journey. So it’s critical in terms of the value
that we can now deliver to those sponsors and not just meet their expectations
-- but exceed their expectations.
Gardner: Beinga New Englander, I remember well in 1999 when the Ryder Cup was in Brookline,
Massachusetts at The Country Club. I was impressed not only by the teams from
each continent competing, but it also seemed like the corporations were competing
for prestige, trying to outdo one another from either side of the pond in how
they could demonstrate their value and be part of the pageantry.
Are the corporations also
competing, and does that give them a great platform to take advantage of your
technology?
Collaborate and compete
Cole: Well,
healthy competition is good, and if they all want to exceed and compete with
each other that can only be good news for us in terms of the experience that we
create. But it has to be exceptional for the fans as well.
So collaboration and
competition, I think, are critical. I believe that any suite of sponsors needs
to operate both as a family, but also in terms of that healthy competition.
Gardner: When
you do your postmortem on the platform and the technology, what will be the
metrics that you will examine to determine how well you succeeded in reaching
and exceeding their expectations? What are those key metrics that you are going
to look for when it’s over?
The
technology platform now gives us the capability to go far. Critical to
the success will be the satisfaction of the spectators, players, and our
commercial family.
Statistical scorecard
Gardner: Let’s
look to the future. Four years from now, as we know the march of technology
continues -- and it’s a rapid pace -- more is being done with machine learning (ML), with utilizing data to its extreme. What might be different in four years
at the next Ryder Cup technologically that will even further the goals in terms
of the user experience for the players, for the spectators, and for the
sponsors?
Cole: Every
Ryder Cup brings new opportunities, and technology is moving at a rapid pace.
It’s very difficult for me to sit here and have a crystal ball in terms of the
future and what it may bring, but what I do know is that data is becoming
increasingly more fundamental to us.
Historically, we have always
captured scoring for an event, and that equates to about 20,000 data points for
a given tournament. We have recently extended it. We now capture seven times
the amount of data – including for weather conditions, for golf club types,
through lie of the ball, and yardage to the hole. That all equates to 140,000
data points per tournament.
Over a schedule, that’s 5.5
million data points. When we look at the statistical derivatives, we are looking
at more than 2 billion statistics from a given tournament. And this is changing
all of the time. We can now utilize Internet of things (IoT)
technologies to put sensors in anything that moves. If it moves, it can be
tracked. If everything is connected, then anything is possible.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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