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HPE news. Tech insights. World-class innovations. We take you straight to the source — interviewing tech's foremost thought leaders and change-makers that are propelling businesses and industries forward.
MICHAEL BIRD
Aubrey Aubrey Aubrey, let me say one word to you one word to you basketball Yes, I I think it's a sport that we can finally agree on the name of Just remember like three or four episodes back. We couldn't agree if it was soccer or football hashtag hashtag team football
AUBREY LOVELL
tale as old as time. Yes, I think we can agree on this one. It's very descriptive. Basketball.
MICHAEL BIRD
Yeah
Yeah, have you been to a game or two in your time, Aubrey?
AUBREY LOVELL
I have, what about yourself?
MICHAEL BIRD
I also have, when I was in Houston. I went to a basketball game there. Let me tell you, I have never seen a t-shirt gun in my life.
AUBREY LOVELL
Were you startled?
MICHAEL BIRD
It was such an experience.
AUBREY LOVELL
Yeah, I bet a culture shock for sure.
MICHAEL BIRD
It was such a culture shock But here's a question once you get into the venue or even the arena itself What is the first thing that you do?
AUBREY LOVELL (wearily)
I'm a millennial, right? So yes, I think you post some pictures, you post it on your socials, hashtag, you know, whatever the game is, and make your presence known essentially, right?
MICHAEL BIRD
hashtag go sports. Well, with over 10,000 other people trying to do the same. Have you ever considered the infrastructure needs to make sure you the fans are all having a good time?
well, in today's episode we're looking at Chase Center in San Francisco to find out more about what's going on behind the scenes and how they make the fan experience tick.
I’m Michael Bird
AUBREY LOVELL
I'm Aubrey Lovell
And welcome to Technology Now from HPE.
MICHAEL BIRD
nowadays, as you know, watching sports isn't just about the game, it's the entire experience. Before you even arrive, from before you even arrive to the moment you leave, there's tons and tons of stuff going on behind the scenes to ensure that you as the fan enjoy every moment that you spend there.
AUBREY LOVELL
And of course it's not just sports, right? I mean, many arenas can be used for sports, music and concerts and other performances as well.
MICHAEL BIRD
And when we're talking about Chase Center, all of these different events use the same technology and the same techniques to ensure you as the fans have a seamless experience from paperless tickets to apps which give you special offers for food and drink, even the security systems, everything is linked up to keep you, the fan, happy.
AUBREY LOVELL
Yep, and engaged.
MICHAEL BIRD
Yeah, absolutely. And sports venues are obviously built with this in mind. So to find out more, I spoke with senior director of IT for the Golden State Warriors, Brian Fullmer. The Golden State Warriors are based at Chase Center in San Francisco. And I spoke to Brian about how they designed and created the arena.
AUBREY LOVELL
But before we get to your talk with Brian and about Dub Nation.
MICHAEL BIRD
Hang on. What's dubnation?
AUBREY LOVELL
Dub Nation, it's the community, it's the fan base of the Golden State Warriors.
MICHAEL BIRD
okay, okay. Fair enough.
AUBREY LOVELL
Anyways, segue, I thought it would be interesting to look a bit into some of the historical sport venues, which means it's time for drum roll technology then.
AUBREY LOVELL
Okay, so technology and arena design and sport have been around for millennia.
Ancient amphitheatres and chariot racing arenas were designed with tiered seating to give everyone a view. Sound design was worked into their shape so that everyone could hear what was being said. And for thousands of years, fan experience has been central to venues and also to our society, right? Archaeologists have found olive pits, cherry stones, blackberry seeds, and even evidence of walnuts at the Colosseum in Rome, proving that we are not the only ones who like a cheeky trip to the concession stand before we watch a game . Just the menu has drastically changed.
And as the world advanced, so did the way we watch sports because nowadays we expect to be able to see a game from start to finish if we're in the audience. But back in the day, once it got dark, that was it. It was over. So Michael, pop quiz time. Do you know what the first sport to use floodlights to illuminate a match was?
MICHAEL BIRD
Can you give me a clue?
AUBREY LOVELL
Okay, I'll give you a hint. it's now viewed as a very, very British sport and pretty posh too, I will say, despite it being over 2000 years old .
MICHAEL BIRD
British sport cricket? No, that's not 2000 years old. go on then, go on tell me.
AUBREY LOVELL
Okay, in July 1878, the first ever game played under floodlights was Polo.
MICHAEL BIRD
yeah, very British,
AUBREY LOVELL
which for those who haven't come across it, it's a bit like playing hockey while riding on a horse.
MICHAEL BIRD
Yeah, I actually live really near to a polo club and I live in quite a horsey part of England so
AUBREY LOVELL
Of course you do.
AUBREY LOVELL
Well, anyways, obviously modern day arenas need to have far more than floodlights to get up and running. So how do they do it?
MICHAEL BIRD
Well to answer that question, I met with Brian Fulmer, the Senior Director of IT at the Golden State Warriors and before we talked about Chase Center, the arena he helped design, the first thing I asked him was, what does a Senior Director of IT actually do?
BRIAN FULMER
my job really is like a chief architect, designer, a coach, a general manager, and really kind of bringing and pulling in the team to actually support all of the technology that we deploy at our arena and our other satellite offices. But I would say if I were to boil that down to one or two things, I feel that I'm a coach or a general manager really orchestrating everything.
MICHAEL BIRD
So, particularly for those listeners who aren't in the US, can you just give us an introduction into Chase Center? Like, sort tell me a bit about what it is.
BRIAN FULMER
The vision of Chase Center is all about live experiences and that equates from the events that we have inside of the arena and it also impacts what is happening around the arena. So we built out a very large city block in San Francisco that includes not just the arena, but approximately 25 retail locations with restaurants. have a brewery, have our team store. We also have two large office towers on our property. And there's a park across the street from the arena that was all part of this destination, which we call Chase Center and Thrive City. It is a 11 and a half acre, approximately a hundred thousand feet of retail plus the 18,000 seat arena. So there's this complete environment that we've created that we wanted it to become a destination that was a must do in San Francisco.
MICHAEL BIRD
So what sort of things do you have to sort out with an IT infrastructure for an 18,000 seat arena? It's not your usual IT estate, I'd say.
BRIAN FULMER
we are designed and built for having all 18,000 fans inside of the building. So we have really built this interwoven, highly connected, multifaceted infrastructure to help facilitate an amazing experience for our fans as they come.
to Chase Center for whatever event they're there for. A basketball game, a concert, family show, it's all the same to us, but at the end of the day, we had that mindset of we're always gonna have 18,000 plus people inside of our home, so we have built it in that way.
MICHAEL BIRD
So some pretty hefty networking,
BRIAN FULMER
it's not your normal traditional IT office build out. One of the stats I love to mention to folks is just to kind of wrap their head around it. We have over 600 miles of fiber optic cabling running throughout the entire venue. We could surround the city of San Francisco multiple times with that amount of fiber but that's what's necessary in order to push all of that data and information and just have that connected experience that our fans really have grown accustomed to.
MICHAEL BIRD
then presumably the 600 miles of fiber connects into a data center somewhere. Wow, okay. Can you talk me through the on-site data center, where it is, what it does, what are we talking about here?
BRIAN FULMER
And I've counted every inch. No, but...
Yeah, so we have one major dedicated data center on premise. It's on the event floor of our arena. It's approximately 1,200 square feet, but it is packed with technology. We have our Aruba switching technology, all of our cybersecurity threat prevention, all of that equipment and infrastructure is packed inside of this data center that is buried deep within the arena.
MICHAEL BIRD
Yeah, yeah, a nd just talk about the arena then. So what are the most important things people should know about?
BRIAN FULMER
I would say the most important things that anyone coming to Chase Center should know or even experience is that it is an unparalleled experience in the sports and entertainment world. We want it to be frictionless from the time that you come onto our property, get connected to our Wi-Fi, scan your ticket on your mobile device, walk in and just take in the full breadth of our arena with visual displays, looking at stats from your favorite player on your phone, walking up to a concession stand, getting something to eat, and just being fully immersed in the environment that we've created. But at the end of the day, from an IT and technology perspective,
We want to be that silent partner. We really want to be invisible.
MICHAEL BIRD
And is Chase Center the sort of stadium or arena that other stadiums or arenas should aspire to be like?
BRIAN FULMER
I really hope so. And even though we're five and a half years old now, we have stayed cutting edge with our technology with the help of being partners with HPE and Aruba. We have replaced all of our equipment with the mindset of staying current and meeting or hopefully exceeding expectations that any fan would have when they're coming and watching a show or watching a basketball game, whatever they're there for. And we heard from the very beginning from our executives in our ownership group that we're in the excitement business. We put on live events. That's what we're we're here for. So everything was thought through from the mindset of a fan and what kind of experience that they could have and trying to live up to that expectation. So that's what's really, really important.
MICHAEL BIRD
You sort of alluded to this but can you just sort of give me a list of the job of IT infrastructure at Chase Center like it's not just Wi-Fi there's more to it than that yeah
BRIAN FULMER
I hope it's not just Wi-Fi. mean Wi-Fi is a core element, but it's so fundamental at the end of the day that I feel that it's kind of a given. I think it's everything else. All the other technology, all the network switches to all of the, I have 8,500 endpoints. We can talk about the security cameras that I have and other devices that are all connected to our network. So there's this interwoven connectedness that from the ground up, from the data center all the way out to a access point to a security camera on a street, everything is just interconnected and it really is the core of this infrastructure that I've been talking about. But how the fan interacts with that infrastructure should never be how or I wonder why they've done that. It should just be automatic. There should just be this effortless, I'm here at Chase Center and wow, I'm connected to a very fast Wi-Fi, I know where my seat is, I know what food I want to eat, and I'm gonna take in whatever show or event I'm here for.
MICHAEL BIRD
I'm from the UK so we talk about soccer so I always think of IT as sometimes a like a goalkeeper. Like you sort of don't want to worry about it unless something goes wrong. like as you said you just want it to be completely seamless don't you? And do you find different events, fans or attendees or audiences like interact with the space differently and does that bring challenges to you and your team?
BRIAN FULMER
Every event is different and presents its own set of challenges. We've hosted an esports event, we've hosted wrestling events, we've had private events, we've had country music to rock and roll, to everything in between,
Every event is completely different. just to give you a couple of examples, that the eSports event that we hosted, the crowd looked different, they acted different, they were all live streaming the events. But it was certainly eye opening from, at that time, we had never seen that much data pushed through our network in a short amount of time.
Yeah, just to put it in perspective, we were pushing around five terabytes of data in just a few hours of this eSports event. have since surpassed those numbers, but I would really equate this as a small city. And the small city is all online, surfing the web, downloading content, live streaming and you could probably think of that in what happens over a weekend. I did it in about two and a half hours.
MICHAEL BIRD
Internet connectivity into the stadium must be pretty immense.
BRIAN FULMER
Pretty immense. Yes.
MICHAEL BIRD
So with so many people accessing your network, you must have to be thinking about cyber security quite a lot. Particularly, I mean, e-sports events. Imagine that. Those sorts of attendees are probably... Maybe they want to try your network a bit more than maybe some other events.
BRIAN FULMER
There are always threats. We unfortunately are a target just like any other entity and we do our very best with I feel that we've created a very robust cybersecurity program. We have over time increased our posture because we've put on so many of these world-class events like the eSports event that you had mentioned.
Certainly when I have 18,000 plus guests inside of my venue, certainly our eyes are wide open in making sure that we are keeping everything and everyone protected.
AUBREY LOVELL
I mean, there's a lot to think about, right? We talk about this a lot where. It's almost kind of implied that you need to do the next thing to be in order to be relevant in today's age, right? Like with stadiums and arenas. And I love what he said about, you know when they were building it they had the mindset of a fan and kind of reverse engineering the experience to what the needs are of the fan. And I think it's really like transversal, right? Because it's not just what happens in the arena. It's also what happens outside because now you're talking about, you know, in the past, you'd have this fan experience that just stayed within the arena. And now with social media and technology, actually goes outside of that and people are seeing that experience with you through social media, all the different clips and things, hashtags, all of that. So it's really cool how they thought through it.
MICHAEL BIRD
I think fan experience is really, really important because to leave the house, to go and do something, it is all about the experience, I think.
I mean, as people who work in technology, we're always taught to think about the user. Like user-centric design is, know, basically how we design things these days. You think about the user and you work your way back and, you know, non-user-centric design is often fails because users find it frustrating to use. We have this expectation that we as users and as fans are thought about, everything should be seamless.
AUBREY LOVELL
And I think we're getting closer to that even more than ever, essentially, in today's world, right? Think about how hybrid these arenas have to be. And it's not just like, you know, in supporting that, like, ultra fan experience, they also have to do concerts. They have to do all these different things. the amount of technology and logistics that go into, like, transforming that is also a really incredible story.
MICHAEL BIRD
I think he said something like 600 miles of fiber, which he said would surround the city of San Francisco, I don't know how many times. Producer Harry informs me that 600 miles is the length of the UK . That is staggering, isn't it? Now,
AUBREY LOVELL
Wild. Wow, that's nuts. It is, it's incredible.
MICHAEL BIRD
Now obviously it takes a long time to build something like Chase Center and technology is constantly evolving so I asked Brian about how he designs something like this so you can stay relevant and modern 10 or even 20 years down the line.
BRIAN FULMER
I actually really like that question because that was one of my core philosophies going into the design and... the planning phase of Chase Center where obviously we had to be flexible, we had to have redundancy, but we had to protect ourselves against what's going to happen in the next two or three years. going back to the 600 miles of fiber optic cabling, probably another hundred, several hundred miles of ethernet cabling and really trying to... plan for any square inch of the building to be lit up for fill in the blank purpose. Yeah. So we feel from that standpoint that we have protected ourselves against the becoming obsolete as best that we possibly can be. So I think we've done as good of job as we could have ever hoped and planned for.
AUBREY LOVELL
Okay that brings us to the end of Technology Now for this week.
Thank you to our guest, Brian Fulmer,
And of course, to our listeners.
Thank you so much for joining us.
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please do let us know – rate and review us wherever you listen to episodes and if you want to get in contact with us, send us an email to technology now AT hpe.com and don’t forget to subscribe so you can listen first every week
MICHAEL BIRD
Subject line, t-shirt cannons.
Technology Now is hosted by Aubrey Lovell, in St Petersburg, Florida and myself, Michael Bird just outside of London.
This episode was produced by Harry Lampert and Izzie Clarke with production support from Alysha Kempson-Taylor, Beckie Bird, Allison Gaito, Alissa Mitry and Renee Edwards.
And this episode was produced by Harry Lampert and Izzy Clark with production support from Alicia Kempson-Taylor, Becky Byrd, Alison Gaito, Alyssa Mitchery and Renee Edwards.
AUBREY LOVELL
Our social editorial team is Rebecca Wissinger, Judy-Anne Goldman and Jacqueline Green and our social media designers are Alejandra Garcia, and Ambar Maldonado.
MICHAEL BIRD
Technology Now is a Fresh Air Production for Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
(and) we’ll see you next week. Cheers!