Agree. Equity mates have put out a Catapult Podcast as well. Quite good and slightly different angle...

Also, I believe Brazilian team was a STATSport customer, where SP provided it at no cost.

Hah! STATSports offered it free to get the All Blacks off Catapult, but lose a freebie in Brazil.

Do the maths. c. 200 professional football teams in Brazil. 19 professional Rugby Union teams in NZ. I know which market I prefer.

Statsports Customer List, the CBF teams, still listed, are below.

Will bookmark this list to see how it changes with each CAT win announcement!

Interesting Does anyone know if the policies for handling data are different between Stat and Catapult?

@Wakem I have been asking myself the same question and would generalise this question, because there are many devices and different vendors, as well as several Athlete Management Systems.

I think there are fours parts to the response:

• The native file formats are likely proprietary, and so the basic answer is "No"
• A data analyst would be able to run the conversions
• APIs have been developed to make this easy
• There are service providers who assist with this (for a fee obviously) and I imagine that vendors would assist as part of customer onboarding.

As part of my ongoing research on this, I found the following link, which maybe helps explain.

https://simplifaster.com/articles/demystifying-apis-managing-data-integrations/

A similar situation developed with accounting data to help firms switch between MYOB, Xero, Sage, and Quickbooks etc.

A good question to add to the list of questions next year when we get Will back!

Thanks Mike , agree a question to ask

The article seems dated? ( couldn’t see a date but off phone) . Article promotes an athlete management system- I would have thought catapult would be providing the AMS not just the data .

no doubt data is exportable to independent databases

Very interesting digging from those here - that the Brazilian team was a STATSport customer.

Before knowing this, I noted the customer quote was a little strange and felt as though it was taking jibes at someone.

"This partnership is very important for CBF and for all professionals involved with our football,” said Ednaldo Rodrigues, President of the Brazilian Football Confederation. “We need to have experienced companies by our side that value excellence to keep our national teams competitive and always at the top of world football. We see these characteristics in Catapult, a brand that offers state-of-the-art materials for accurate and reliable analysis of our athletes." (emphasis mine)

@mikebrisy , @Wakem My thoughts on both your posts from a few perspectives, hoping one of them hits the mark as "Data handling" can both be a narrow or super broad topic:

DATA OWNERSHIP - these were my notes from the Hayden Stockdale SM meeting. I would imagine StatSports would have the same terms as these are fairly common

• Data is owned by the team’s
• CAT has the right to use the data to improve its algorithms on an anonymous basis
• Teams do not have the right to monetise the data without CAT consent - this is to ensure that monetisation is not used in a way which competes with CAT
• Data is not interesting to a 3rd party unless it is for the whole league - teams are more interested in winning, it is the leagues that are more interested in the data as they care about eyeballs, fan engagement etc

Data Handling can also mean how data is stored and protected within CAT and Statsports, cyber security etc. This would also be fairly consistent and "standard" across both companies.

Data Conversion vs Data API's

• Data Conversion is usually a one-off exercise to move data from legacy systems into a new system, at system startup time. 
• Data API's are for ongoing transactional data transfers from one system to another eg. Xero to CBA for bank data, Siteminder to Global Booking Websites for booking transaction detail etc

Re: the Simplifaster article, the context appears to me to say "API's will ease the movement of data", so that the client can focus on coaching rather than managing the data. That is absolutely correct. CAT will have API's for every one of CAT's wearables and solutions which feed data into their SBG-based Decision Engine platform. Similarly, StatsSport would have the same API capability within their ecosystem with their wearables.

But the article is really not quite relevant in terms of data migration, data useability and inter-operability between and across Statsports and CAT (and vice versa), because of the points below.

CAT would want their customers to start up rapidly to reap the benefit of the technology and to start revenue flows. I suspect CAT will rapidly load up the static data required to run the CAT solutions (players, health data etc), get the Customer using the systems in the CAT solutions and then finetune the soluton as the data emerges from the field. Migrating data from an inferior legacy system would be quite counter to this.

I can't see CAT having the slightest interest in converting legacy performance data when they start up a new client, who are say, on Statsports. The data from Statsports would be so inferior and incompatible, it would be pointless to spend months writing data conversion routines for a one-off exercise which, because of different technology/solutions, I can't quite see being relevant to the new CAT solution. 

Conversely, for Statsports, the CAT data would be far too complex for them to ingest into their systems, assuming that they can get access to it and decipher it, to begin with. They will simply not have the system capability to make use of a significant portion of CAT's data because (1) wearables technology is proprietary and so raw data from CAT will need to analysed, mapped and hopefully be useable in Statsports' world (2) CAT data will have video data which will need to be stripped out to be pure wearables data (3) CAT's algorithms would presumably be applied to the raw wearables data, which also needs to stripped out to be meaningful (if this is even possible). 

Data analysis and mapping, the absolute fundamentals of migrating data, can only really be done if an analyst knows BOTH source and target systems and how the data is derived, used, stored in BOTH systems. I can't see how this can be practically possible by a 3rd party in the context of CAT and StatsSports.

I can't think of a scenario where CAT data is used in a API outside of the CAT ecosystem with an external system. If a team exits CAT, all it will have is historical raw data. All it can do, theoretically anyway, is to ingest this data into another platform, where all of the issues above arise. Data becomes less useful, the older it becomes.

In short, in doing a 360, I can't quite find an area of concern around data, other than perhaps cybersecurity. The combo of significantly superior CAT Solution + algorithms + data, across both wearables and video, plus huge first mover advantage, is one hell of a moat I feel.

Hope this makes sense.

@jcmleng a lot of what you write makes perfect sense, and thanks for clarifying the API vs. conversion point.

The only points I am less clear on is how important and feasible data conversion is, and what the rights of the athlete and data owner are, and indeed the value of a longitudinal dataset for a single athlete, i.e., over time. (e.g., In the context of player acquisition and divestment.)

I vaguely recall this having been covered in earlier SM meetings, and probably need to revisit these in due course. (I find, as a general point, that as I learn more about a company, I “hear more” in earlier meetings that cover some of the basics.)

In any event, it is always good to get deeper insights from community members who know more. And you are absolutely right in that understanding these details is important to understanding how good the moat is, which will show up in churn over the longer term as the industry matures.

The only points I am less clear on is how important and feasible data conversion is, and what the rights of the athlete and data owner are

I would be very surprised if there isn't legislation that captures this data, either explicitly or incidentally, and means it ultimately belongs to the athlete. It is after all an employer collecting private health information about their employee. There was an instance a few years ago where a network in Australia wanted to use players' heart rates in their broadcast as part of a sponsorship deal with a health insurer and the players pushed back and said no.

I agree with @jcmleng though about the interoperability of the data. I doubt any of these systems will ever be designed to make transferring data from one provider to another simple. Which is a pretty powerful pick and stick moat.