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Previously, clubs would have spent tens of thousands flying scouts around the world: now they can watch talent from the PC in the chief scout’s office.
Since 2009, Scout7 has offered curated video clips alongside the player data. Now, once clubs have a shortlist of players matching their criteria, they can watch the player’s recent matches to help them make an initial assessment of whether he’s the type of player they’re after. Previously, clubs would have spent tens of thousands of pounds flying scouts around the world to watch a player in action: now they can do it from the PC in the chief scout’s office.

Having used the video to whittle down the shortlist, the clubs can then send their scouts to do what they’ve always done: visit grounds and make a first-hand assessment of a player. The top clubs employ dozens of scouts, and potential transfer targets will be watched several times by multiple experts before the manager is asked to watch the player himself. The reports from the club’s own scouts are fed into the Scout7 database, so the chief scout can collate and add it to the information that Scout7 provides to all of its member clubs from its own database.This poses two challenges for Scout7. First, it has to make the scout’s report forms as simple and accessible as possible, because even today your average football scout is more comfortable with a pen and notepad than a laptop. “We’re not talking about guys from technical IT backgrounds; we’re talking about guys who might struggle to find things in an internet browser,” says Griffiths.

Second, it has to ensure the tightest possible security, both internally and externally, because at the highest levels of football you’re dealing with intellectual property worth tens of millions of pounds. Each club’s data is encrypted, and only authorised personnel within the club can access the key scouting information. This is achieved through tight management of access controls by Scout7 itself, because “clubs either didn’t trust themselves to do it properly or didn’t want the burden of it”.Consequently, individual scouts entering data into the system aren’t granted access to the shortlists of the club’s main transfer targets, because these (often poorly paid) freelancers could pass that hugely valuable information on to other clubs. What’s more, if the chief scout receives a better offer to join a rival club, he can’t take all that valuable information with him, because it’s all stored on Scout7’s servers – something that makes Scout7’s cloudbased service even more attractive to the CEOs of the leading football clubs.

The 800TB of video footage in Scout7’s database grows at the rate of 3,000 full-length HD match videos every month.
Scout7’s scouting database isn’t only used to identify new players, it’s also a source of intelligence on rivals. The video database can be searched to, say, review the past ten goals scored by a forthcoming opponent, or watch a team’s set-piece routines. These curated video clips can be shared with players in team meetings or downloaded onto their iPads, so they can do their homework on the guy they’ll be marking on Wednesday night.Delivering all this data and HD video footage on demand, to clubs that pay hundreds of thousands of pounds per year for access, is no small feat of IT management. Scout7 runs a mixed environment, using some third-party cloud services and some of its own high-performance Intel Xeon-based servers. “The bare-metal machines are used where we have specific performance requirements that just can’t be delivered through an Infrastructure as a Service environment,” says Griffiths. “That’s really the database side of things, because we do a lot of pre-aggregation of data, so that from a user experience you receive instant results. You need bare metal to get that level of performance.”

The company also uses its own server equipment to store and deliver the 800TB of video footage in its database, which grows at the rate of 3,000 full-length HD match videos every month. “In terms of video, we’ve built up that infrastructure ourselves,” says Griffiths. “To go to a third party and say ‘we need 800TB of storage, it has to grow by this amount every month and we need certain bandwidth’, the costs would be huge. So we manage that within a dedicated hosting environment.”With customers that include many of Europe’s leading football clubs, which have scouts located right across the globe, the Scout7 database must be constantly available, and the company puts a lot of effort into ensuring hardware failures don’t disrupt its service. “Redundancy is inherent all the way through the environment,” says Griffiths. “For example, the way we set up our hard disk arrays: if any number of disks go pop, everything will keep working. We have hot standby on the databases, so if something goes down we’ll always have good service with the other one. We have off-site backup of the video archive, so that the entire archive is reproduced in a geographically separate location.”

Griffiths says the next step for Scout7 is working with partners to bolster its databases with even more information. Clubs don’t want to log in to different systems to get players’ medical records, for example, they want it all in the one place. Griffiths says the company is looking to partner with other software providers so it can collate that information: “We accept we can’t do everything ourselves.” Football is a team game, after all.Any business that spends a chunk of its time maintaining its laptops needs to take a hard look at itself. A good use of your time? I think not. But, like so many businesses that grow organically, that’s exactly the situation faced by Millpool Community Centre – the Cornwall-based organisation I’m helping, with the happy assistance of HP when it comes to kit supplies, to transform its operations.

The prime symptom here may sound familiar to you: an ad-hoc collection of consumer-grade laptops, with no easy way to manage updates, backups or security. These laptops are the heart of Millpool’s service delivery to the community, so keeping them safe and spry are key to the community centre.And each laptop has a lot of internal roles. There’s the simple business of surfing, with assistance if the user isn’t web-savvy. There’s support for visiting service professionals, such as lawyers or the bits of the NHS that don’t have their own permanent premises in the town, who expect to have access to their systems and web pages. There are training days, when disposable virtual machines would be by far the preferred option for Ross, the IT volunteer.

These eight low-cost laptops are supplemented by a further two with a very different brief: divided between management of the actual operation, and being taken out on trips into the field.These eight low-cost laptops are supplemented by a further two with a very different brief: divided between management of the actual operation, and being taken out on trips into the field.For example, Ross hopes to make use of Windows 8’s Hyper-V to allow students in his training days to make all the mistakes in disposable, snapshotted virtual machines. He wants to image the basic operating system itself back to the poorly-named HP MicroServer, which is not at all Micro when it comes to the number of complete machine backups it’s able to retain.These eight low-cost laptops are supplemented by a further two with a very different brief: divided between management of the actual operation, and being taken out on trips into the field. Millpool has a lot of “field”, too. Nine parishes of current and potential customers is a lot of little twisty Cornish lanes to cover.

As ever, it isn’t all about hardware. Some of the next phase of the transformation requires a bit of midwifery from me, configuring the server and getting the right relationships in place between domain memberships, user logins and private stores for data.Using the HP business laptops inside the centre is more about the IT equipment reflecting and fitting into the multi-role nature of the space, so their daily life is likely to prove my point from the last blog about the imperceptibility of these transformations. If all goes well then this great diverse bunch of users, of both the centre and the machines, won’t perceive much of a change in each individual job they use the machines for: the changes are coming for Ross, in terms of much-reduced turnaround times when it comes to the wildly different types of “laptop job” he’s faced with.http://www.dearbattery.co.uk/sony.html

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