Q&A: UEFA IT manager Daniel Marion

UEFA provides a match streaming service for broadcasters

As ICT senior manager for the Union of European Football Association's (UEFA) media technologies, Daniel Marion has the task of ensuring a compelling online football service is delivered to both fans and broadcasters.

Computing talked to Marion about how UEFA delivers content to the fanatical masses of European football supporters, and his take on the technology behind its services.

What requirements does UEFA have from its IT function?
Daniel Marion: Like every organisation we have our corporate systems, but they're rather small, because UEFA has only got about 400 employees - we're really an SME. Those systems are run out of our Geneva datacentre.

The main packages, like our B2B and B2C-type applications, are hosted by NTT Europe Online [European arm of Japanese telecoms firm NTT], and we've built a modular ERP-type system to manage football and our events. It's called Football Administration Management Environment (Fame), and with this system we can manage everything from updating football scores online to doping control information, ticketing, logistics and accommodation.

We've developed these applications over time using Microsoft technology, and the solution is used by what we call the football family – that's the clubs, the leagues, the federations, and our partners, which are mainly sponsors and broadcasters. It's part of a big B2B application pool, which is all run as a web application – SaaS, if you want.

How would, for example, broadcasters use this system?
They’d use this system to tell us if they need a place in the TV compound to keep their trucks during a match, and what commentary position they require, and with what connectivity, for example.

They can also set up their accreditations and ticket requirements, as well as pick which matches they want to cover. In the UK you have Sky and ITV, so because ITV is a free-to-air channel, it has the right to pick which matches it wants first - that's a UEFA rule.

The same system is also used by referees. For example, if you're a referee, you can find out which match you'll be refereeing online. For picking referees for matches, the process is quite a complex one involving the referee himself, the referee's own national association and our referee unit.

Where are your main datacentres?
Our core site is hosted in London and we have backup datacentres in Geneva and Madrid. We chose London because we needed a big point of presence, and in 2001 in Europe that meant London, Amsterdam, potentially Paris or Frankfurt.

We need a lot of throughput due to our large B2B and B2C applications and the UEFA.com web site. We also operate a live streaming service on behalf of our broadcasters, because from 2006 we bundled the broadband rights with the broadcast rights. So when you buy a three-year package, you can put it on the internet as a pay-per-view service.

We built a platform to help our broadcast partners distribute matches online, because some of them don't have the capability to stream the matches, so we do it on their behalf.

What's the biggest IT outage you've had?
We've never really had a big outage, although we have had glitches, like issues with streaming delivery, and there have been quality issues in the US. We've only had one issue that triggered our service level agreement (SLA), but if we do have SLA breaches, we don't want financial compensation – we want to make sure that it doesn't happen again.

What type of virtualisation are you using?
We use VMware on our Microsoft platform, and we're running virtual infrastructure for most of our corporate systems, because we don't have huge loads. For our staging environments, integration and development we also use virtualisation, but our production B2B and B2C web applications use clustered databases, which we run on non-virtualised physical hardware.

You mentioned databases, how are they set up?
We're optimising the way we develop our applications so they can take advantage of – especially on the web side of things – several different databases. For instance, there's one for editing, one for user information etc, and we're trying to segregate them from an application perspective.

As for scaling out these databases to get more performance, we're not so sure that this will work. Database access for the B2B/B2C applications is certainly the biggest bottleneck for us. The issues we've had on performance in the past were mainly database driven, not because of anybody's fault – but the load on the databases was so high that the resources we had couldn't cope. The technical architecture team is looking into how future services will be delivered.

As an example of the problems we face, we run a fantasy football game and at the end of the matches, everybody tries to log on to the application – that's about 200,000 users. If they all try to log in at the same time – obviously it's going to be slightly slower than if you logged in the next day.

The same goes for ticket sales, even if we've set up a lottery for people to apply to get tickets, they tend to apply as soon as the details are online, even though it doesn't change the chance they have of getting a ticket. We have queuing mechanisms in place to try to reduce problems accessing the database, and we'll take about 5,000 logins at a time.