Collingwood Football Club of the Australian Football League has started using Pure Storage’s FlashArray//M system in a VMware vSphere environment, giving it a data platform to analyze a variety of player performance-based information in real-time.
Using on-field sensors, the club monitors kicks, marks, handballs and scoring sources for each team on the field. After matches, Collingwood is able to quickly create custom reports that provide analysis on player performance improvement and outline the game plan for the next game. The player information is provided by analytics partner Champion Data.
“With the modern game, we need answers in real time,” Collingwood Operations Manager Marcus Wagner told The Australian. “The coaches will come to you with a range of requests, and they want vision on something immediately without any compromise.”
Before this implementation, Collingwood was forced to manually comb through the data it wished to keep online because of the low storage room of its old systems.
This move permits the club to map and mark every single movement that occurs on the field of play, providing detailed and precise information to the team’s coaching staff during game play, which allows coaching decisions to be made on the relevant data and not entirely on feel.
“It is 100 percent getting away from gut feel and saying ‘show me the statistical analysis of why one decision is better than another,'” Pure Storage Regional Vice President Mike Sakalas told ZDNet.
Founded in the Silicon Valley, Pure Storage also has established offices in Melbourne and Sydney. It provides drive storage solutions and is Collingwood’s laptop partner.