Red Sox IT Leader Talks Digitizing Fenway Park, MLB's Cybersecurity Push And The Role Solution Providers Play

Digitizing Historic Fenway Park

How do you take a 100-year-old historic baseball park and modernize it for the digital age that pleases more than 35,000 diehard Boston Red Sox fans? That was the challenge given to Brian Shield, vice president of IT for the Red Sox, three years ago – digitizing historic Fenway Park to enhance the fan experience.

"We had to submitted over 500 photo simulations of what the wireless access points were going to look like before we could get them installed," said Shield, responsible for the strategic direction of technology and daily IT operations for the Red Sox, in an interview with CRN. Shield also weighs in on MLB's security push and future technologies inside Fenway – such as virtual baseball cards and scavenger hunts (think Pokemon Go) for kids.

"We're looking at augmented reality capabilities -- being able to use your phone to see things like what the skyline of Boston looked like if you go back to 1912 when Fenway was built," said Shield.

What were the challenges in bringing Fenway Park, built in 1912, into the digital age?

It's a nationally historic landmark, so that posed certain challenges like how we installed over 500 wireless access points in Fenway a year ago – that required approval of every single one of those from a Historical Society perspective. We had to submit over 500 photo simulations of what the access points were going to look like before we could get them installed. Now we have great Wi-Fi and cellular service through Verizon and others.

Mobile applications are playing a large role during game day inside stadiums. What future apps can fans expect?

We're experimenting right now with different types of cameras to show people how long the lines are at various restrooms or at concession areas. So you look at mobile app to figure out which makes most sense for me to go too. We're doing more food ordering type of opportunities.

Today, fans don't have access to instant replay on their phone; hopefully that will change. There will also be more access to personal information to be able to more personalize your environment as you enjoy the game of baseball.

How heavily is the MLB investing in cybersecurity inside ballparks?

There's a massive effort going on on behalf of all of baseball to basically overhaul security across the board for all teams. We're one of a handful of teams on the leading edge of doing that. It's a comprehensive plan that involves anything from penetration testing to password management, traditional types of things, mobile management, security provisioning and education. A lot of it's education -- making people aware of what is a typical attack, what do they look at and how to avoid them.

MLB just recently did a spoof attack.

What type of spoof security attack did the MLB conduct?

An example attack to see how many people would click on certain types of phony emails and those types of things. We see those numbers coming down, but they're not where they need to be. So we need to continue to make people aware when they see these different [cyberattack] scenarios.

How many IT staff does the Red Sox have during an average game at Fenway?

We probably have 15 full-time people and another support group of another five-plus that support technology at Fenway.

How much IT staff do your vendors provide during game day?

Very few. We have them on call, that type of thing, but for the most part it's all handled by ourselves.

How are the Red Sox going to deal with the rising data demands inside stadiums?

Going into the 2016 season, we doubled cellular capability for fans, while at the same time installing Wi-Fi.

A lot of it's going to move towards Wi-Fi and away from cellular as some of the various telecommunications providers kind of piggy-pack on the Wi-Fi network. That will be something that will continue to happen. We'll continue to bolster our Wi-Fi infrastructure as necessary. We did this in collaboration with MLB.

What's the Red Sox connectivity rate in regard to the amount of fan activity connected to the Wi-Fi network at any given time?

Our goal is to ensure that 50 percent of the people in any section of the ballpark have access to internet at the same time, which is a pretty high watermark. We tend not to see those numbers rise above 20 percent or 30 percent at any given time.

But as more video and services become more bandwidth-intensive, you'll continue to see our needs for installations -- and stadium environments in general -- continue to have to really bolster their infrastructure.

What vendors are being used inside Fenway?

Our wireless environment is Meru [Networks] now owned by Fortinet. So Fortinet is our network provider for wireless – they're our antenna environment here. Our cellular environment is Verizon installations, but it's vendor-neutral, so that also includes now AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint – they're all on there.

ShoreTel was one vendor that was really an important investment for us.

What makes ShoreTel so crucial at Fenway?

Because they really decreased the levels of effort for doing maintenance. The level to support users to make changes and things like that use to be a relatively problematic thing for us. We had an Avaya model and that was more challenging to maintain and also had to be done almost by a specialist. Now those are things that can be done by anyone of our help-desk people.

So we're constantly looking at efficiencies that allow us to do many of these things that otherwise would require a much larger staff.

Did channel partners play a role in digitizing Fenway?

Yes, because we invested quite a bit in monitoring. [Solution provider] Harbor Networks monitors our infrastructure, our telephony infrastructure with ShoreTel. Often we will get notified from them that we're seeing higher volumes coming from our connection between here [Boston] and one of our spring training facilities in Florida. There's a lot of proactive management to the environment so we're not forced into a situation where we have to call in vendors.

How big of an impact do solution providers have inside Fenway?

A lot. For example with ShoreTel, we asked them for their best integration partner that they had. They pointed at Harbor Networks … they've been outstanding, met all of our expectations. It was really a pleasure to work with them on project management, to architectures, to assessing our environment to implementation, then to managing the environment.

Their model is how I would like to see a lot of other VARs work.

How much is mobile app usage growing?

Mobile app usage is growing dramatically this year. We've seen an uptick in mobile services within the ballpark and we work closely with the MLB on mobile applications.

We have a whole digital plan which is all around how do you cater to the fan, create these compelling experiences – everything from the kiosk, to mobile ticketing, seat upgrades to hosting services and things. We leverage Wi-Fi capability to create new tablets in our suites now so that customers can order food. We've got all of our restaurants now using wireless devices in taking orders.

What future technology can we expect to see inside Fenway Park in five years?

We're now doing a lot more with virtual reality. We're having conversations with Microsoft with their HoloLens. We're looking at augmented reality capabilities -- being able to use your phone to see things like what the skyline of Boston looked like if you go back to 1912 when Fenway was built.

We're looking at a lot of new functionality with tours because we have a huge tour business here. We have 300,000 people that tour Fenway every year. Maybe we take the tour experience in a more virtual reality kind of model.

What's the Red Sox goal in enhancing the game experience through technology?

It's all around how do we make the process of coming to Fenway less stressful, especially with those who have families and kids. We're looking at different applications like digital scavenger hunts to give kids something else to do if, say, the weather is bad. We're looking digital baseball cards to reconnect with the youth.

Technology is one of [the Red Sox] bets and it's an important one.