After nearly 150 years, baseball is still considered America’s favorite pastime. Even while staying faithful to tradition, the Miami Marlins have been able to embrace digital transformation and forge partnerships with tech powerhouses that arm them with the tools needed to digitally connect franchise to consumer.

One of the organization’s challenges is delivering products and experiences to fans while computing on the edge, touching customers not only during, but beyond the season.

“While baseball needs to continue to innovate and modernize, there’s actually this interesting equilibrium as to how much it continues to challenge those traditions that differentiate it from many other points of contact, and where it should continue to preserve those elements to hold what has been generational-type engagement,” said Adam Jones (pictured), chief revenue officer of the Miami Marlins LP.

Jones spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) during the Citrix Synergy event in Atlanta, Georgia. They discussed the new direction of the Miami Marlins’ franchise and how the Major League Baseball team is embracing digital transformation with its Citrix partnership (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Martin: Talk to us a little bit about your role as the CRO of the Miami Marlins. Then we’ll get into what you’re doing with Citrix.

Jones: I joined the Marlins 18 months ago as part of new ownership and the new leadership team brought in to reset the standard for what the Miami Marlins organization could be. We want to be a world-class sports entertainment enterprise. That means we’re going to evolve beyond a traditional baseball team and ballpark 26 years into the history of the franchise and eight years into the operating rights of the ballpark.

There’s a lot of work to be done around those two assets. But as we take the organization forward, we want to continue to broaden that enterprise to focus on more sport and entertainment offerings.

Townsend: We don’t get many CROs at a technology conference. What made you take time out of your schedule to come to Citrix Energy?

Jones: I think it’s indicative of the culture we’re building within our organization. We’re putting data at the very center of our culture. We’re going to make informed and timely decisions, and we need our technology to enable that culture. So when it came to where we were going to align our IT group, it’s a group that has built out a very robust on-prem infrastructure over the past seven years following the opening of Marlins Park.

It was a strategic decision to make sure that the infrastructure was meeting the requirements of the organization as we rapidly evolved what our priorities are and what we need in order to deliver on their very aggressive and lofty expectations for the organization.

Martin: Talk to us about what the employee experience means for the Marlins and also as an indicator on the revenue side.

Jones: We have an evolving workforce. It’s very young across a very diverse enterprise of activities. What we’ve been able to do in partnership with Citrix since day one of the ballpark … is build out an infrastructure that was very light in terms of hardware, focused very much on the digital workspace that keeps us very nimble and allows us to deploy capital in areas that we see tremendous value back in terms of application and utility.

As we continue to make our workforce more mobile, ask them to deliver and work at a higher rate of speed, we need to arm them with the tools that allow them to perform those roles in the office, out of the office, and engage beyond more than an 81-day transactional relationship across Marlins baseball.

Martin: As CRO, you’ve got all these different sellable moments, not just in the ballpark, but even online. So having this kind of cohesive opportunity to sell not just tickets, but food and beverage, merchandise — in person, on mobile, on a tablet or on a desktop, it’s got to be a critical part of your strategy. I imagine that it’s essential that you have the right technological foundation to deliver sellable moments.

Jones: That’s right. The ecosystem of the sport is a fairly diverse one. From the ticketing transaction to all of the ballpark touchpoints to what we’re trying to create is that 12-month relationship with a fan. So that goes into creating a lot of content and how we distribute that content in order to continue to earn that engagement well beyond 81-plus days of baseball.

The technology in terms of our storage and our accessibility is what allows us to begin to personalize and tailor not only those core traditional transactions and touchpoints of sport, but how we transition into more of that broader entertainment enterprise and making sure that we can deliver those as personalized and tailored as we can.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Citrix Synergy event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Citrix Synergy 2019. Neither Citrix Systems Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE