The Big Ten Conference and Data Clymer recently announced a strategic partnership focused on transforming sports data analytics at the conference. This joint effort will focus on building a new data strategy and platform for accelerating innovation, driving fan engagement, and enabling new business partnerships for the Big Ten Conference.

A New Modern Data Platform for the Big Ten Conference

As part of this new strategy, the Big Ten Conference and Data Clymer are partnering to build a cutting-edge cloud data platform designed to transform how the conference engages fans, conducts business, and identifies innovative growth opportunities. This modern data infrastructure will revolutionize the Big Ten Conference’s advanced analytics capabilities by centralizing its disparate data streams into a trusted, single source of truth to generate rapid insights.  

“We announced the formation of our data and analytics department in December 2021 and this is the next step in building our data infrastructure,” said Big Ten Conference Commissioner Kevin Warren. “We are investing in analytics and technology to ensure the Big Ten Conference properly engages our extremely passionate fanbase, our valuable business partners, and continues to honor our 126-year-old brand.”

“Our partnership with Data Clymer will be a foundational component of our ambitious growth strategy and will greatly accelerate our ability to deliver compelling data-driven experiences to our student-athletes, member institutions, fans, and stakeholders of the Big Ten Conference.” —Kevin Warren, Big Ten Conference Commissioner

Professional Sports Teams Are Realizing the Benefits

Major professional sports organizations, including Data Clymer clients the Las Vegas Raiders and the San Francisco Giants, have been seeing tremendous success from these team-owned, cloud-based modern data stacks.

Not only do these new team-owned data platforms consolidate data from various data sources (such as ticket sales, concessions, web analytics, social platforms, mobile apps, and CRM applications) into a centralized cloud data warehouse creating a single source of truth, but they also enable sports teams to perform advanced data modeling and generate near real-time analytics for better business decision making. 

How 4 Top Sports Teams Are Winning Fans and Revenue with Snowflake

In addition, combining previously disparate customer data sources enables teams to gain a complete 360 degree view into a team’s fan base and better understand fan behavior and fan preferences. This, in turn, gives them a wealth of opportunities to drive fan engagement.

By partnering with Data Clymer, the Big Ten Conference is anticipating similar results. The new solution will not only improve the conference’s ability to drive fan engagement, but will also provide valuable, real-time data that will uncover insights and drive more informed business decisions. This new data strategy and modern data platform will also be designed to scale, delivering a foundation for future innovation that aligns with the speed of business at the conference.

Explore a collection of resources on data analytics in sports

3rd Party Managed Service Platforms Are Insufficient

Historically, many professional and collegiate sports organizations have relied upon third-party, managed service providers to perform data and analytics on their behalf.  But, as data volumes, data sources, and data complexity have increased, these legacy data platforms are no longer able to meet the business and technical requirements that contemporary sports teams expect.

Many organizations that have weighed the pros and cons of a CDP vs a data warehouse found that a modern data stack is a better long-term solution. Today’s business need data solutions that are designed with speed, flexibility, and performance in mind. These elements are critical for understanding an increasingly sophisticated fan base with numerous options on where to spend their discretionary entertainment dollars. 

For instance, a flexible and highly customizable data platform was particularly important for the Las Vegas Raiders as they entered a unique market with a largely changing demographic every week. And it’s not just sports teams that need to create a robust data platform that will enable them to personalize a customer’s experience, model customer behavior, and support predictive models to improve business performance. This a requirement for any modern organization. 

As a result, organizations like the Big Ten Conference are increasingly turning to data engineering consulting firms like Data Clymer to help with the modernization of their data infrastructure and the development of a more robust data strategy.  Organizations and businesses are realizing the need to develop a more actionable analytics cycle that will yield a much more powerful return on investment in data and analytics

Data Clymer CEO and founder Aron Clymer remarked, “We are extremely excited about partnering with the Big Ten Conference to build out a new and innovative data infrastructure that will become a foundation for driving fan engagement and uncovering new business opportunities with Big Ten partners. We have had strong success with creating similar data stacks for organizations inside and outside of the sports industry and are looking forward to providing comparable results to the Big Ten Conference.” 

To learn more about Data Clymer’s Sports Data Analytics practice, please contact us for a free consultation.

For more data strategies and success stories, explore our free collection of resources on data analytics in sports.


 

Jesse has over two decades experience as a marketing professional within many successful technology and data management companies including SendGrid / Twilio, Matillion, and Fivetran. Jesse is responsible for promoting the Data Clymer brand and amplifying the success of Data Clymer customers.