The Chicago Cubs franchise broke the Curse of the Billy Goat at the 2016 World Series, winning for the first time in 108 years. Now can it bring century-old Wrigley Field into the Digital Age with Informatica Corp.’s big data management?

“When I joined back in June of 2012, we recognized that there was really a lack of investment inside of technology,” said Andrew McIntyre (pictured), vice president of technology at the Chicago Cubs, during Informatica World in San Francisco, California.

On his second day with the Cubs, McIntyre admitted to his colleagues that he did not know what a “rain hat” was. They then led him into the stadium’s data center, he told John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. (* Disclosure below.) 

“A rain hat is a corrugated piece of plastic that you put on top of your racks so that when it rains in your data center, it pushes the water to either side,” they cheerfully explained. It was then that McIntyre knew what kind of work he’d signed up for.

To modernize and drive business with data, the stadium first needed a remedial connectivity upgrade to Wi-Fi. “We see that as that foundation layer,” McIntyre stated. The Chicago Cubs organization has partnered with a technology provider to Levi’s Stadium in San Francisco to overhaul its own cellular infrastructure.

Big data gets fans in the game

Specifically on the data side, “Informatica has been a key to our enterprise data-management program from the beginning,” McIntyre said. The franchise’s five major revenue lines are collated on Informatica, and it plans to branch out its future analytics from there.

Wi-Fi and Informatica data management in tandem will engage fans with experiences like MLB.com’s Ballpark App and proximity marketing, he said.

“Mixing [Wi-Fi data] in with social, you’re starting to see very, very large sets of data,” he said, adding that the organization expects to mine value from these data sets via big data management and analytics.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Informatica World 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World. Neither Informatica Corp. nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE