InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
|
April 9, 2001 |
 |
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE:
How Baseball Got 30 Sites On The Same Team
By Clinton Wilder (cwilder@cmp.com)
 |
| More on Major League Baseball: |
|
|
he history of baseball is the story of great deeds, often accomplished against huge odds: Mark McGwire's 70 home runs in a season, Hank Aaron's 755 homers in a career, the Miracle Mets' 1969 World Series championship. For the past year or so, another defy-the-odds achievement has occurred in baseball, but you won't read about it in the sports pages or at Cooperstown.
Migrating 30 individual team Web sites to the new centralized home of MLB.com required the kind of teamwork needed to execute the hit-and-run or turn a double play. And many teams, especially those with leading-edge Web sites, weren't overjoyed about making the change.
"We didn't have agreement every day from every person, but most people were wildly supportive, which surprises some cynics," says Major League Baseball Advanced Media president and CEO Bob Bowman.
Much of the IT coordination was directed by Michael O'Neil, MLB Advanced Media's systems architect and acting chief technology officer, in conjunction with integrator Scient Corp. The actual cut-over took place in just six weeks, ending on Feb. 28, with the 30 teams migrating in groups of four. MLB ended its hosting deal for its own site with CBS SportsLine.com, and many clubs had to end contracts with other third-party Web hosting companies. "A lot of those companies were in financial trouble, which actually helped us," says O'Neil.
All of baseball's Web operations now run on Sun Microsystems Solaris servers located at Digital Island Inc.'s server farm on Staten Island in New York City. An Oracle8 database runs on Sun Enterprise 6500 boxes, while 30 Enterprise 4500s run application servers for each club using IPlanet application and Web server software. Web site features are handled by Interwoven Inc.'s content-management system. Baseball expected some 15 million page views on Opening Day last week. "We're sized for massive growth," says O'Neil.
The trade-off between the standard look-and-feel of the centralized sites and individual team site features is an ongoing dance. "We want the club sites to be customizable but without having to duplicate core code," says O'Neil. "If a team asks for exceptions to the standard feature set, we'll recode it. But if a second team asks for the same thing, then we ask, 'Is there a pattern?' It may be something we want to standardize so we don't duplicate development efforts."
In his previous jobs, O'Neil worked on consolidating multiple business-unit applications such as sales force automation for Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. and other big corporations, but he knows that baseball touches its customers at a much deeper level.
"This isn't just about the clubs, but about the clubs' public in 30 cities and around the world," he says. "With every Web feature or function decision we make, we know just how visible it is." Even if it won't get a line in the Baseball Encyclopedia.
return to A New Game Plan
 E-mail To A Friend | Printer-Friendly |  Send Us Your Feedback |
|
|
Featured Microsite
