Building the sports stadium of the future

'It's going to be like nothing that's ever been built before,' says Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadivé

"When people make postcards of California I want the Kings Arena to be on them," stated Vivek Ranadivé, CEO of software firm Tibco and majority owner of the Sacramento Kings NBA basketball team.

The stadium, which is scheduled for completion in 2016, will sit in the heart of California's state capital and is being designed by AECOM, the architects who drew up the plans for the London Olympic Park.

Featuring an innovative indoor-outdoor design that will utilise the natural cooling of the seasonal delta breeze in the hot summer months, initial drawings show a steel and glass stadium surrounded by an outdoor plaza from where viewers will be able to see the game going on inside through large windows. Equally, concerts staged in the plaza will be viewable by punters from within the 50,000-seat stadium, opening up a wide range of possible functions for the Kings Arena beyond its core purpose of staging basketball games.

Ranadivé's ambitions go beyond creating a unique new sporting and cultural landmark. As a technologist, IT is at the centre of his plans.

"It's going to be like nothing that's ever been built before," he told Computing. "When you walk towards the Arena it will check into you. It will say ‘welcome, this is where your seat is, this is how to get there from the parking lot, this is where to get the food you usually buy, this is the shortest line for concessions close to your seat'."

It will even, Ranadivé says, tell you which toilet nearby has the shortest queue.

The key to such fine-grained personalisation is, of course, data. Lots of it. Franchises operating within the Arena - the ticketing agencies, hot dog vendors, sellers of team merchandise - will be plugged into a central software bus via a special Arena API, allowing all sales data to be collected and analysed in one place.

On top of this, a sophisticated loyalty programme will allow the Kings Arena's software to build a detailed behavioural model of each and every opted-in fan, allowing specially tailored offers to be broadcast to the individual's smartphone on a just-in-time basis. It will be watching you too.

"If you put out a tweet saying I'm unhappy, we can give you something we already have and you'll be happy," said Ranadivé. For example, if the system knows you normally buy pizza at a certain time and that there is a shortage of pizza but an excess of hotdogs, you might be sent a discounted hot dog offer just before your usual pizza break.

Fans won't need their wallets either, as the Kings Arena will be cashless and ticketless, and those who prefer not to opt in to Ranadive's vision of "basketball redefined as a social network", by sharing personal data will still be able use the "very high bandwidth connections to every seat and multiple screens giving stats and views from other stadiums. But if you opt in, the entire arena is customised for you."

Sport is an enormous generator of data, and the Sacramento Kings team will not let any of that precious stuff go to waste. In fact, Ranadivé said, when it comes to data the world hasn't seen anything yet.

"I'm going to generate more data in one game than was generated in one year in the past," he claimed.

"There will be six cameras mounted overhead and they'll convert everything into digital data. - I'm going to have an analyst with an iPad sitting behind coaching staff so we will know things as the game's progressing."

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Building the sports stadium of the future

'It's going to be like nothing that's ever been built before,' says Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadivé

Before two opposing teams meet, their respective coaches trawl through information about past matches between the sides, be that written notes or video footage, to look for clues about how this or that tactic or formation might give them the edge this time around. Nothing new there.

The difference now, says Ranadivé, is that the iPad-wielding analyst will be able to overlay this historical information with digital data that is streaming in in real-time.

"Yes we'll be looking at historical data, but also at data that happened that day... it's all about math, it's a big data problem."

With this data-driven approach to sport, Ranadivé hopes to achieve big results from making small changes.

"The pattern doesn't lie. If the data shows that if you move this player two inches to the right you improve his chance of scoring to 90 per cent from 80 per cent and if I can say ‘move a little closer to the player when you're defending and move an inch to the left and he's going to struggle to make a shot' that's the kind of data I'm going to have. I'm going to know where the sweet spot is for shooting, guarding, other team combinations to get the best results."

While the planned Kings Arena might be unique, the potential for real-time "actionable analytics" in sport is anything but. Ranadivé said that Tibco has been in discussions with "a number of UK and European soccer clubs," so expect to see data analysts in the dugout at your local football club soon.