HPE Discover 2024 | Transforming IT – HPE GreenLake and the Dallas Cowboys

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More from HPE Discover 2024

Bryan Thompson

Vice President of Product Management, Private Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

HPE

Matt Messick

CIO

Dallas Cowboys

Dallas Cowboys leverage AI and data analytics for a competitive edge

Sports technology is changing the business landscape, transforming the game itself and also the management of diverse operations and fan engagement.Today, the integration of sophisticated data analytics and hybrid cloud solutions, such as HPE GreenLake, is at the forefront of this change. These advancements are making organizations more agile and efficient, driving growth and elevating customer experiences beyond traditional boundaries. This tech-driven approach is reshaping the sports industry, highlighting the critical role of technology in achieving competitive advantage and operational excellence

play_circle_outline Navigating Challenges in Diverse Technology Businesses and Jerry Jones' Oversight of Various Industries

play_circle_outline Fan engagement and analytics in sports

play_circle_outline Leveraging data for value and new experiences

play_circle_outline The Growing Global Influence of Sports: Collaborative Strategies for Content and Innovation

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Transforming IT – HPE GreenLake and the Dallas Cowboys

Bryan Thompson

Vice President of Product Management, Private Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPE

Matt Messick

CIO Dallas Cowboys

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Good morning, everyone. It is Juneteenth, and we are on day two of theCUBE's live coverage of HPE Discover here in Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my co-host and co-analyst, co-founder of theCUBE, Dave Vellante. We're still basking in the glory of the Celtics' Championship win, but today we're talking football.

>> We are, but we're still humble.

Rebecca Knight

>> We are. Well, maybe. I'd like to welcome our next two guests to the show. We have Bryan Thompson, VP of product management, HPE GreenLake Cloud Services at HPE. Welcome back to theCUBE.

>> Yeah. Thank you. Good morning.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Matt Messick. He's the CIO of the Dallas Cowboys. Welcome, Matt.

Matt Messick

>> Thanks for having me.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. So as I said, we're going to talk football, so let's hear from you. Talk through, to our viewers, what are some of the challenges that you're facing in terms of how you think about supporting your diverse group of businesses in terms of technology?

Matt Messick

>> Listen, it's all about being nimble and being able to react and move fast. Yes, you hear the Dallas Cowboys, the big brand, the global brand, but what you don't know-

Rebecca Knight

>> America's team.

Matt Messick

>> Yeah, America's team. But what you don't know is all of the other businesses. Jerry Jones, he is an entrepreneur. He has ideas. And on the technology side you just have to make it happen. And so whenever you have to position yourself, it's very difficult to look forward. Look forward two, three years when an idea can just come out of nowhere that you have not planned for, and you have to react. And there is no, "Well, maybe we can get it done." You have to get it done.

>> Now, your scope is pretty wide. It's not just the football team, right? Is that correct?

Matt Messick

>> 100% correct.

>> So can you explain the businesses that Jerry Jones oversees?

Matt Messick

>> It fluctuates because there's new and then there's old, but we throw out the 150 entities, businesses. Now, all of those don't require intense technology support, but we have a wide variety. Medical imaging is a huge one. We have multiple facilities all around the state of Texas. Multiple radiologists doing scans and studies on MRIs and CAT scans and all that. We have retail, we have construction, we have co-working spaces. Let's see. When I say construction, we're building warehouses. We're almost flipping warehouses. Stand them up, and in North Texas you can't build them fast enough. And so it goes on from there. We have e-sports. It's so much fun. Merchandising, you hear, "Cowboys-branded stuff." So we manufacture, host, sell, distribute. If it has a Cowboy's star on it, comes from us. No other sports teams manufacture. Nobody's doing anything like that. And then we pivot that into a different business of just apparel, uniforms, swag, like HPE polos. If HPE was one of our customers, we could definitely do that for you. But all of that information, all the gear, we can do that also. So when you hear about ideas, it's like, "Hey, we're already doing all this merchandising for the Cowboys brand. We've already got it in place. Why don't we pivot that and form a completely different business?"

>> And I want to get into the GreenLake aspects here, but this is fascinating because, you think of the business of sports, you think, okay, NFL. It's a lot of TV. Major League Baseball, it's more the gate. But now you're talking about all these other businesses that you can form. Let me ask you a question. The vertical integration in the manufacturing, is that a margin motivation? Is it a quality? Is it the brand? Is it all of those?

Matt Messick

>> 100%. It's all of it. And the thing was, when Jerry bought the team, nothing like that was happening. And it did come into the revenue aspect of it. And it's like, why would I let somebody else control my fate when I can do that myself? And so he was a pioneer. And it was a couple of years after he bought the team, he went after it really hard and took all of that merchandising aspect in-house. And then you can control it. And it's-

>> Jerry Jones is great for the sport of football, but you guys got to win one again because then the haters will come out and it'll be even more fun.

Matt Messick

>> Right. You notice I don't have a ring on today because I can promise I would have it on if-

>> You got some.

Rebecca Knight

>> But I'm really curious to hear how you're talking about Jerry Jones, and he's obviously a legendary leader, but what does it mean to have someone who is, Jerry says something, we got to get it done? We have to go bend the laws of physics and execute his vision. What is it, from both of you, to have that kind of leader, that kind of visionary who is really setting the agenda and making sure teams are firing on all cylinders? Not all organizations have that, but what is it like working for someone like that?

Matt Messick

>> Well, look, it's never boring. And people ask me that all the time. And it's like, there are no boring days. I might get a week out of the year when they're on vacation or something like that. But yeah, it's very exciting. It's challenging because there is no time for complacency. There isn't. And even look at, and I'm not speaking for HPE, but like Antonio and like yesterday and everything that came out in the keynote, and having that type of visionary leader that's thinking so far down the path. Me as a customer, being excited for all the news and everything that's come out. And I know I haven't heard everything. It's

>> Well, Bryan, we've talked to Antonio about this. He had to bang some heads to make sure everybody's playing ball with GreenLake.

>> Yeah.

>> And then that's become an advantage for you guys, because the message here is very clear. It's an integrated strategy. It's not a bunch of stovepipe widgets. It's like, "We're selling solutions for this AI era." I wonder if you could talk to it-

Matt Messick

>> Yeah. I think part of the key, and it actually goes back to something that Matt mentioned, is in his space, the diversity of different things that he has to try to serve, it's all about being nimble. That's really where GreenLake has continued to evolve. And how do we bring together the GreenLake cloud as now not a siloed set of offerings from HPE, but a very thoughtful, how do I bring a portfolio? Leveraging things that are hybrid in nature, provide interoperability, think about monitoring observability. Now we're bringing together the AI announcement we made yesterday with our Private Cloud AI solution. That is really a full pan-HPE solution, where we brought together all the different components from our teams and how we bring together that full turnkey engineered stack, partnered closely with NVIDIA to co-engineer that. It's a great example of bringing that together to really deliver that experience and provide that nimble agility that customers are looking for.

>> Interested in how you're taking advantage of this capability today, but please you have-

Matt Messick

>> Well, yeah, and we've talked about this as far as all of us that were here several years ago in GreenLake. That's all that was talked about at Discover. GreenLake, GreenLake. And you hear the vision. And you hear the vision. And that's what I felt yesterday is, like, the vision, it's all happening. And now it's just, let's plug more things into the platform. Hey, we've got this private AI. Let's... you're just dropping it into the platform and making it easy to operate. And going back three years ago when it was just GreenLake, GreenLake, you couldn't grab the full picture. You knew it was the future. And then now, watching it actually unfold, it's been fun for a customer.

>> And I mentioned that we first had the Cowboys on in 2010, theCUBE's first year. And you were doing some pretty advanced things back then in analytics, with the state of infrastructure back then.

Matt Messick

>> Yeah.

>> If I recall, you were doing some really interesting things with supply and demand and end of season and inventory and pricing on merchandise. Oh, Romo had a good game so-

Matt Messick

>> Oh, absolutely.

>> So what's the state of that analytics today? And where does GreenLake fit?

Matt Messick

>> It's definitely accelerating, and that's one of the great things. Just about a month ago, we just had a great AI workshop, HPE led, and we were actually targeting more of the football operations side. We brought in all of our analytics teams, and it was one of those conversations to where, "Hey, let's figure out what we can do. Here's all the data. What is possible?" And the funny thing is we were creating all of these plans and use cases of what exactly we're going to do, and now we know what the hardware is. Now we know exactly what it's going to run on. But that's the exciting thing, is there's so much data. All your fan engagement, all the data that we're sharing with the league that we're getting back. It's being able to act on all of that data. Everything that we've heard, obviously, the last couple of days, it's really exciting to be able to start taking these early conversations. And we've been a little, at least from stepping into the AI aspect of it, it's been a little conscious, and that's by design. I think a lot of people have.

>> Yeah.

Matt Messick

>> And then now it's time. Okay, we've got our idea, we've got our plan. Let's start moving fast.

>> Can you paint a picture of your environment? Is it a hybrid environment? And what does that look like?

Matt Messick

>> I would say it is a... we have multiple data centers, stadium, and our headquarters building. Everything is GreenLake-based, and so the majority of it is our hybrid cloud that we operate on the GreenLake platform.

>> And so you're using public cloud as well or-

Matt Messick

>> Not as much.

>> Some?

Matt Messick

>> Not as much.

>> You use it for like spillover or just surge?

Matt Messick

>> Yes, a little bit of surge-

>> Backup?

Matt Messick

>> Yes, backups, and a lot of our 360 Microsoft environment and things like that, and some of our Azure.

>> Two-part question. Why are you choosing to do the majority of your work on-prem? And how does that affect your AI strategy in terms of your data's obviously, on prem?

Matt Messick

>> Well, especially in the football aspect, we do a lot of video. A lot of big video. Video is everything to coaches, players. That's where you do your studying. You're studying the opponent, picking your draft, your players. Everything is video, your homework in between games. And so when you have that much video, you're living on-prem. Everything has to be fast, I mean incredibly fast. And with all of the other data. And then still, you get on the football side of things, they don't want to change very quickly. They're a little old school, and so they're still protective. They want to know where their data is living, and it's protected underneath our umbrella in our private cloud.

>> You'll be applying AI to that video. I can only imagine the types of things, the insights you're going to get out of that. And that's proprietary data. That is hugely proprietary.

Matt Messick

>> And I don't want to go too far down there, but that's exactly where we're at, working with HP. Some of the different things that we can do with video and some sensor data on the players, and merging some of this stuff. So that's where we're going.

>> And that's early days. There's a lot of considerations there. There's privacy stuff, there's making it work.

Matt Messick

>> Yep.

Rebecca Knight

>> Not all of us are so under the hood with how these teams operate, but we're all fans. And so can you paint a picture of what the future looks like for fan engagement in terms of how teams are going to use analytics and make our experience more engaging and more fun?

Matt Messick

>> It is exciting, but a lot of times it's venue-based. If you walk into our stadium, this massive video board, we've already got a lot of information. And it is. That's what fans want. Especially when you're sitting at home and you have all the data, you have all the analytics. You can pull... so it's providing more information. And look, it all starts, to me, it starts with connectivity. You've got to be connected. Everybody has to be on all the time in-venue. And then now it everything else that we can overlay and just give them more. And that's the world we live in now, is people just don't want to watch a game. They want to understand exactly what happened. What did happen? And get into the weeds.

>> . Go ahead. Sorry.

Rebecca Knight

>> No, particularly because sports is one of the few shared communal experiences we now have in this sliced and diced media environment.

>> I think it's fascinating, working with customers like Matt, because now you think about, they've been collecting. They have all these different ways to collect all this data. And now there's all these new potentials of, how do you actually leverage that and provide value and new experiences, or come up with things that wouldn't even thought of five years ago? Like we talked about this sensitivity of this data. This becomes competitive. This becomes differentiating. And the blue star experience that you can be providing based on... it's exciting to see these different scenarios and use cases.

>> It's competitive, but what about collaboration? The NFL's owners, it's a club. And they're expanding, they're going overseas. You see what's happening in basketball. So many great international players. And so is there an aspect of collaboration that you're able to affect?

Matt Messick

>> 100%? Look, there's not going to be a collaboration on the secret sauce of your scouting app and some of that different types of things, but one of my peers is out here at Discover right now. And as we've been walking from place to place, just having great conversations. And the NFL does a great job of bringing all of the technology teams together to do that. To brainstorm, to share information. And it's a club. And not just the NFL, it's all sports. The Tottenham Hotspurs, they're out here. And I got to know them through HPE and Discover. The Golden State Warriors. We all, it's like community spread around the world. I talk to clubs from Australia. Cricket clubs, all kinds of stuff, and we're just sharing. And we all... look, it's fun. And you want to raise the boat. You want to raise that experience across the globe because all the fans, it doesn't matter what sport, they're asking for it.

>> You know what's interesting? You're right. The demand is off the charts. And look, there's only so many seats at the NFL table or NBA or MLB. That's why you see women's sports now exploding. I heard a stat the other day. It's not surprising, but the NCAA Women's final had 2X the viewers of game five.

Rebecca Knight

>> Caitlin Clark effect. Yeah.

>> Right?

Matt Messick

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> There's only so many billionaires they'll let in, and so they want to put their money elsewhere and grow these other sports. And international sports. Soccer's going through the roof. Of course it always has been. It's actually quite remarkable. Okay, Tony Romo. Better QB or announcer and a game analyst? I think he's a pretty good game analyst. I liked him as QB, too, but you don't have to answer that.

Matt Messick

>> It is fairly polarizing. Living in Dallas, and the radio station there will break down his call of the game. And look, that question, you're hard on one side of the other.

>> It's funny. A lot of people don't. I love Tony Romo's analysis.

Matt Messick

>> Yes.

>> He sees things before they happen, and you're like, "Wow, that's good." I learn things when I listened to him. Anyway.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. A really fun conversation.

Matt Messick

>> Thank you.

Matt Messick

>> Thanks.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of HPE Discover. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.

Transforming IT – HPE GreenLake and the Dallas Cowboys

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Good morning, everyone. It is Juneteenth, and we are on day two of theCUBE's live coverage of HPE Discover here in Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my co-host and co-analyst, co-founder of theCUBE, Dave Vellante. We're still basking in the glory of the Celtics' Championship win, but today we're talking football.

>> We are, but we're still humble.

Rebecca Knight

>> We are. Well, maybe. I'd like to welcome our next two guests to the show. We have Bryan Thompson, VP of product management, HPE GreenLake Cloud Services at HPE. Welcome back to theCUBE.

>> Yeah. Thank you. Good morning.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Matt Messick. He's the CIO of the Dallas Cowboys. Welcome, Matt.

Matt Messick

>> Thanks for having me.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. So as I said, we're going to talk football, so let's hear from you. Talk through, to our viewers, what are some of the challenges that you're facing in terms of how you think about supporting your diverse group of businesses in terms of technology?

Matt Messick

>> Listen, it's all about being nimble and being able to react and move fast. Yes, you hear the Dallas Cowboys, the big brand, the global brand, but what you don't know-

Rebecca Knight

>> America's team.

Matt Messick

>> Yeah, America's team. But what you don't know is all of the other businesses. Jerry Jones, he is an entrepreneur. He has ideas. And on the technology side you just have to make it happen. And so whenever you have to position yourself, it's very difficult to look forward. Look forward two, three years when an idea can just come out of nowhere that you have not planned for, and you have to react. And there is no, "Well, maybe we can get it done." You have to get it done.

>> Now, your scope is pretty wide. It's not just the football team, right? Is that correct?

Matt Messick

>> 100% correct.

>> So can you explain the businesses that Jerry Jones oversees?

Matt Messick

>> It fluctuates because there's new and then there's old, but we throw out the 150 entities, businesses. Now, all of those don't require intense technology support, but we have a wide variety. Medical imaging is a huge one. We have multiple facilities all around the state of Texas. Multiple radiologists doing scans and studies on MRIs and CAT scans and all that. We have retail, we have construction, we have co-working spaces. Let's see. When I say construction, we're building warehouses. We're almost flipping warehouses. Stand them up, and in North Texas you can't build them fast enough. And so it goes on from there. We have e-sports. It's so much fun. Merchandising, you hear, "Cowboys-branded stuff." So we manufacture, host, sell, distribute. If it has a Cowboy's star on it, comes from us. No other sports teams manufacture. Nobody's doing anything like that. And then we pivot that into a different business of just apparel, uniforms, swag, like HPE polos. If HPE was one of our customers, we could definitely do that for you. But all of that information, all the gear, we can do that also. So when you hear about ideas, it's like, "Hey, we're already doing all this merchandising for the Cowboys brand. We've already got it in place. Why don't we pivot that and form a completely different business?"

>> And I want to get into the GreenLake aspects here, but this is fascinating because, you think of the business of sports, you think, okay, NFL. It's a lot of TV. Major League Baseball, it's more the gate. But now you're talking about all these other businesses that you can form. Let me ask you a question. The vertical integration in the manufacturing, is that a margin motivation? Is it a quality? Is it the brand? Is it all of those?

Matt Messick

>> 100%. It's all of it. And the thing was, when Jerry bought the team, nothing like that was happening. And it did come into the revenue aspect of it. And it's like, why would I let somebody else control my fate when I can do that myself? And so he was a pioneer. And it was a couple of years after he bought the team, he went after it really hard and took all of that merchandising aspect in-house. And then you can control it. And it's-

>> Jerry Jones is great for the sport of football, but you guys got to win one again because then the haters will come out and it'll be even more fun.

Matt Messick

>> Right. You notice I don't have a ring on today because I can promise I would have it on if-

>> You got some.

Rebecca Knight

>> But I'm really curious to hear how you're talking about Jerry Jones, and he's obviously a legendary leader, but what does it mean to have someone who is, Jerry says something, we got to get it done? We have to go bend the laws of physics and execute his vision. What is it, from both of you, to have that kind of leader, that kind of visionary who is really setting the agenda and making sure teams are firing on all cylinders? Not all organizations have that, but what is it like working for someone like that?

Matt Messick

>> Well, look, it's never boring. And people ask me that all the time. And it's like, there are no boring days. I might get a week out of the year when they're on vacation or something like that. But yeah, it's very exciting. It's challenging because there is no time for complacency. There isn't. And even look at, and I'm not speaking for HPE, but like Antonio and like yesterday and everything that came out in the keynote, and having that type of visionary leader that's thinking so far down the path. Me as a customer, being excited for all the news and everything that's come out. And I know I haven't heard everything. It's

>> Well, Bryan, we've talked to Antonio about this. He had to bang some heads to make sure everybody's playing ball with GreenLake.

>> Yeah.

>> And then that's become an advantage for you guys, because the message here is very clear. It's an integrated strategy. It's not a bunch of stovepipe widgets. It's like, "We're selling solutions for this AI era." I wonder if you could talk to it-

Matt Messick

>> Yeah. I think part of the key, and it actually goes back to something that Matt mentioned, is in his space, the diversity of different things that he has to try to serve, it's all about being nimble. That's really where GreenLake has continued to evolve. And how do we bring together the GreenLake cloud as now not a siloed set of offerings from HPE, but a very thoughtful, how do I bring a portfolio? Leveraging things that are hybrid in nature, provide interoperability, think about monitoring observability. Now we're bringing together the AI announcement we made yesterday with our Private Cloud AI solution. That is really a full pan-HPE solution, where we brought together all the different components from our teams and how we bring together that full turnkey engineered stack, partnered closely with NVIDIA to co-engineer that. It's a great example of bringing that together to really deliver that experience and provide that nimble agility that customers are looking for.

>> Interested in how you're taking advantage of this capability today, but please you have-

Matt Messick

>> Well, yeah, and we've talked about this as far as all of us that were here several years ago in GreenLake. That's all that was talked about at Discover. GreenLake, GreenLake. And you hear the vision. And you hear the vision. And that's what I felt yesterday is, like, the vision, it's all happening. And now it's just, let's plug more things into the platform. Hey, we've got this private AI. Let's... you're just dropping it into the platform and making it easy to operate. And going back three years ago when it was just GreenLake, GreenLake, you couldn't grab the full picture. You knew it was the future. And then now, watching it actually unfold, it's been fun for a customer.

>> And I mentioned that we first had the Cowboys on in 2010, theCUBE's first year. And you were doing some pretty advanced things back then in analytics, with the state of infrastructure back then.

Matt Messick

>> Yeah.

>> If I recall, you were doing some really interesting things with supply and demand and end of season and inventory and pricing on merchandise. Oh, Romo had a good game so-

Matt Messick

>> Oh, absolutely.

>> So what's the state of that analytics today? And where does GreenLake fit?

Matt Messick

>> It's definitely accelerating, and that's one of the great things. Just about a month ago, we just had a great AI workshop, HPE led, and we were actually targeting more of the football operations side. We brought in all of our analytics teams, and it was one of those conversations to where, "Hey, let's figure out what we can do. Here's all the data. What is possible?" And the funny thing is we were creating all of these plans and use cases of what exactly we're going to do, and now we know what the hardware is. Now we know exactly what it's going to run on. But that's the exciting thing, is there's so much data. All your fan engagement, all the data that we're sharing with the league that we're getting back. It's being able to act on all of that data. Everything that we've heard, obviously, the last couple of days, it's really exciting to be able to start taking these early conversations. And we've been a little, at least from stepping into the AI aspect of it, it's been a little conscious, and that's by design. I think a lot of people have.

>> Yeah.

Matt Messick

>> And then now it's time. Okay, we've got our idea, we've got our plan. Let's start moving fast.

>> Can you paint a picture of your environment? Is it a hybrid environment? And what does that look like?

Matt Messick

>> I would say it is a... we have multiple data centers, stadium, and our headquarters building. Everything is GreenLake-based, and so the majority of it is our hybrid cloud that we operate on the GreenLake platform.

>> And so you're using public cloud as well or-

Matt Messick

>> Not as much.

>> Some?

Matt Messick

>> Not as much.

>> You use it for like spillover or just surge?

Matt Messick

>> Yes, a little bit of surge-

>> Backup?

Matt Messick

>> Yes, backups, and a lot of our 360 Microsoft environment and things like that, and some of our Azure.

>> Two-part question. Why are you choosing to do the majority of your work on-prem? And how does that affect your AI strategy in terms of your data's obviously, on prem?

Matt Messick

>> Well, especially in the football aspect, we do a lot of video. A lot of big video. Video is everything to coaches, players. That's where you do your studying. You're studying the opponent, picking your draft, your players. Everything is video, your homework in between games. And so when you have that much video, you're living on-prem. Everything has to be fast, I mean incredibly fast. And with all of the other data. And then still, you get on the football side of things, they don't want to change very quickly. They're a little old school, and so they're still protective. They want to know where their data is living, and it's protected underneath our umbrella in our private cloud.

>> You'll be applying AI to that video. I can only imagine the types of things, the insights you're going to get out of that. And that's proprietary data. That is hugely proprietary.

Matt Messick

>> And I don't want to go too far down there, but that's exactly where we're at, working with HP. Some of the different things that we can do with video and some sensor data on the players, and merging some of this stuff. So that's where we're going.

>> And that's early days. There's a lot of considerations there. There's privacy stuff, there's making it work.

Matt Messick

>> Yep.

Rebecca Knight

>> Not all of us are so under the hood with how these teams operate, but we're all fans. And so can you paint a picture of what the future looks like for fan engagement in terms of how teams are going to use analytics and make our experience more engaging and more fun?

Matt Messick

>> It is exciting, but a lot of times it's venue-based. If you walk into our stadium, this massive video board, we've already got a lot of information. And it is. That's what fans want. Especially when you're sitting at home and you have all the data, you have all the analytics. You can pull... so it's providing more information. And look, it all starts, to me, it starts with connectivity. You've got to be connected. Everybody has to be on all the time in-venue. And then now it everything else that we can overlay and just give them more. And that's the world we live in now, is people just don't want to watch a game. They want to understand exactly what happened. What did happen? And get into the weeds.

>> . Go ahead. Sorry.

Rebecca Knight

>> No, particularly because sports is one of the few shared communal experiences we now have in this sliced and diced media environment.

>> I think it's fascinating, working with customers like Matt, because now you think about, they've been collecting. They have all these different ways to collect all this data. And now there's all these new potentials of, how do you actually leverage that and provide value and new experiences, or come up with things that wouldn't even thought of five years ago? Like we talked about this sensitivity of this data. This becomes competitive. This becomes differentiating. And the blue star experience that you can be providing based on... it's exciting to see these different scenarios and use cases.

>> It's competitive, but what about collaboration? The NFL's owners, it's a club. And they're expanding, they're going overseas. You see what's happening in basketball. So many great international players. And so is there an aspect of collaboration that you're able to affect?

Matt Messick

>> 100%? Look, there's not going to be a collaboration on the secret sauce of your scouting app and some of that different types of things, but one of my peers is out here at Discover right now. And as we've been walking from place to place, just having great conversations. And the NFL does a great job of bringing all of the technology teams together to do that. To brainstorm, to share information. And it's a club. And not just the NFL, it's all sports. The Tottenham Hotspurs, they're out here. And I got to know them through HPE and Discover. The Golden State Warriors. We all, it's like community spread around the world. I talk to clubs from Australia. Cricket clubs, all kinds of stuff, and we're just sharing. And we all... look, it's fun. And you want to raise the boat. You want to raise that experience across the globe because all the fans, it doesn't matter what sport, they're asking for it.

>> You know what's interesting? You're right. The demand is off the charts. And look, there's only so many seats at the NFL table or NBA or MLB. That's why you see women's sports now exploding. I heard a stat the other day. It's not surprising, but the NCAA Women's final had 2X the viewers of game five.

Rebecca Knight

>> Caitlin Clark effect. Yeah.

>> Right?

Matt Messick

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> There's only so many billionaires they'll let in, and so they want to put their money elsewhere and grow these other sports. And international sports. Soccer's going through the roof. Of course it always has been. It's actually quite remarkable. Okay, Tony Romo. Better QB or announcer and a game analyst? I think he's a pretty good game analyst. I liked him as QB, too, but you don't have to answer that.

Matt Messick

>> It is fairly polarizing. Living in Dallas, and the radio station there will break down his call of the game. And look, that question, you're hard on one side of the other.

>> It's funny. A lot of people don't. I love Tony Romo's analysis.

Matt Messick

>> Yes.

>> He sees things before they happen, and you're like, "Wow, that's good." I learn things when I listened to him. Anyway.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. A really fun conversation.

Matt Messick

>> Thank you.

Matt Messick

>> Thanks.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of HPE Discover. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.