For a sports software company like Hudl, its coach and athlete users are, for the most part, much more interested in how teams and players can win more games than in the technology itself. Whether it’s football, soccer or basketball, more and more teams film their matches and analyze them, looking to spot areas where the teams and the individual players can improve.

As such, it’s crucial for Hudl to deliver a robust, fast and accessible set of online video editing tools, lists of athlete and game stats, and performance analytics to their users. To deliver at speed and to crunch the data, they look to Sumo Logic Inc. to provide a machine data analytics platform as the backbone to a cloud-native, microservice architecture.

“[Our clients are] not excited about technology the way I am. They want to be a better coach, they want to win more, they want to be better at what they do, and we are just that means to an end,” said Jon Dokulil (pictured), vice president of engineering at Hudl.

Dokulil spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Sumo Logic Illuminate event in San Francisco. In addition to how Hudl interfaces with Sumo Logic, they talked about the potential for preprogrammed video cameras. (* Disclosure below.)

Fixed cameras that automatically film games

As Hudl’s business grew, the complexity of keeping all of the systems running and running also grew quickly, and its data analytics platform wasn’t able to keep up. The company wasn’t looking to add a dedicated data analytics team internally, so it began to research outsourcing this function. After due diligence, they decided on Sumo Logic and found it was the perfect choice, according to Dokulil.

With the advent of smartphones and tablets, coaches and teams can take more and more video, but as video quality improves, the file sizes grow quite quickly. So it can be difficult to upload and edit. One of the areas where Dokulil would like his company to expand in the future is to set up fixed cameras on tripods that are pre-programmed with the game schedules and that can record and download games and matches into the correct Hudl account.

“We want to automatically do that, using machine learning and artificial intelligence. There’s no reason we can’t see [where the action is], and let’s focus on that,” Dokulil concluded.

 Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Sumo Logic Illuminate event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Sumo Logic Illuminate. Neither Sumo Logic Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE