NBA accelerates modern app time to market to ramp up fans’ excitement

Basketball is a dynamic and exciting sport with over 400 million fans spanning the globe. You can’t help but watch from the edge of your seat as the ball flies across the court into the hoop, beating the buzzer in the last few seconds and winning the game. Basketball fans are immersed in every aspect of the game, from the teams to the players. 

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is dedicated to delivering compelling experiences for its fans off the court as well by using the latest technology. The NBA’s partnership with Microsoft has enabled them to accelerate their time to market and increase productivity and scalability. Beyond the court, NBA employees, referees, and production professionals work tirelessly to create magic. The NBA's IT Application Development Group understands that fostering the excitement of the NBA needs to happen everywhere—and modernizing applications and data using the cloud will bring the NBA experience to life. 

Fans’ experiences drive the NBA’s innovation

The NBA is a fan-driven business, and people pay money expecting a certain kind of experience. As technology continues to evolve, new opportunities have emerged for sports leagues to think creatively about their fans’ experiences and how to make it even better. 

“Fans’ experiences are something that we care about dearly. Data has been instrumental in informing our decisions around how to construct new experiences for our fans,” reports Sahil Gupta, Senior Vice President and Head of Application Development.

Delivering on these experiences digitally requires accelerated time to market, increased productivity, and scalability, so the IT Application Development Group needed to modernize their apps and data. When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the league to a halt, the perfect opportunity presented itself.

“I think one of the opportunities that the pandemic presented was to have a re-look at how non-personal experiences were shared with our fans,” says Gupta. “We've introduced a lot more in terms of capabilities on our products, such that the fans actually get a more holistic experience—a virtual experience that starts to become closer to the real-world experience they get when interacting with our digital products.”

The NBA invested heavily to make sure the fans still felt connected to the game through virtual experiences even though they could not be there in person. NBA and Microsoft simulated the experience of being present in the arena, while not being in physical contact with other fans, through a virtual simulation. It wasn’t a replacement for the excitement of sitting courtside, but it did replicate as much of the in-game experience as possible. Additionally, these virtual experiences didn’t just stop at the fans—the experiences included referees and NBA employees as well.

Modernization paves the way 

The NBA launched an app for referees called REPS (Referee Engagement and Performance System). REPS was designed to aid referees and management in evaluation, collaboration, training, and development, so that the NBA could ensure that referee decisions were consistent across all games. Though this app was built for referees, it also supports the fans’ experiences. After all, few things drive fans crazier than inconsistent calls. 

REPS utilizes a centralized performance platform with video integration and social messaging that allows referees and the referee association to watch, analyze, share, save, categorize, and comment on plays. Through accumulating actionable data via video captures and machine learning, the referee association can ensure consistent performances.

“This was one of our first innovation projects started in 2020,” says Tony Tran, Head of the Customer Application Development at the NBA. “We’ve been going through version two, version three in the last couple of years. With each iteration we revolutionize the way we manage referee on-court performance. REPS was built to improve our referee performance and to improve the integrity of the NBA basketball games, helping our referee organization be world class.” The success of the product is evident from an almost 1000 percent increase in the performance volume conversations within the referee organization since the web and mobile app launched.

REPS was such an enormous success that in May 2022, the app was named “Capgemini Innovation of the Year” at the 2022 Sports Technology Awards, presented by the STA Group. This was a prestigious honor and REPS beat out Chelsea Football Club, the NFL, the NHL, and Meta for the top prize. 

With over 1,800 NBA employees, the NBA’s IT Application Development Group also focused on improving the employee experience with an app called NBAOne. NBAOne is a mobile-first employee app that consolidated 50+ different applications into a single-sign-on experience. It significantly improved the day-to-day lives of employees, helping them to be more efficient and effective in their jobs by enabling them to make reservations, look up team contacts, mark time off, book game tickets, and more, all while on the go. It also provided valuable data to the team on how people were using the apps, so the organization could continue to fine tune them to make them better.

“Given our cloud-first strategy, we were looking for a cloud partner who can keep up with the volume, who is able to scale up and scale down as the demand fluctuates—and able to add the horsepower when needed,” says Puneet Toteja, AVP, Business Systems Lead at the NBA. “With all those requirements in mind, Azure, our cloud partner was able to deliver on all of that.”

The right partner at the right time

Knowing that acceleration and time to market were key factors, the team didn’t want to just lift-and-shift from on-premises to the cloud. “Azure was a very easy transition for us from the Microsoft technology tools that we're using for building web applications, mobile applications, to be able to re-platform that into Azure tools,” says Tran. 

Tran says the development group knew it needed to go through a recoding exercise, utilizing Microsoft apps and services such as Azure Blob Storage, Azure App Service, and Azure SQL Database. In modernizing the code and data, the group knew it could better achieve accelerated time to market, increased productivity, and scalability.

“I think it has been a very well-rounded partnership,” says Gupta. “We've learned how to work in lockstep and be productive as we work together,” says Gupta. “We've learned how to better utilize Microsoft Cloud and the resources and data systems that exist at Microsoft. We are committed to staying current with innovative technology like Web 3.0 and metaverse—bringing that knowledge into the NBA has been paramount.”

The first step in the process was to consolidate everything into one place. The NBA was running apps and data from several locations including on-premises, hybrid cloud, and virtual machines—and trying to efficiently manage OS patching, performance, and security. Partnering with Microsoft meant the NBA could offload many of those tasks to the Microsoft teams, allowing them to focus their time and efforts on the modernization. 

“Microsoft played a huge role, both from the awareness perspective and helping us understand what it can do for us to help drive the business forward and our ROI,” says Toteja.

Migrating everything to Azure and utilizing Azure App Service not only automated many of the tasks NBA employees were doing themselves—scaling, repo management, security, etc.—but also made the app coding process itself more seamless with low code and no code scenarios. 

“I think the number one thing in having a cloud partner in Azure is the ability for us to have a playground where we can go in and quickly experiment new things, test out new features, and use the functionality that comes out of the box natively from a cloud perspective, be it the Azure SQL Database, or Azure Functions, or Azure Templates,” says Gupta. 

Additionally, the NBA IT Application Development Group was able to take advantage of many other Azure apps and services. Specifically, REPS was built with React.js and .NET to provide pure performance increases with speed and throughput; the group used the Azure DevOps deployment pipelines and Azure DevOps git repository to be more agile and tighten the feedback loop for developers. This allowed the group to deploy more frequently with confidence. It also used Azure Notification Hubs for mobile push notifications to enable an out-of-the-box system that works for all mobile devices that it would not have to create from scratch. “It was a natural evolution for us, moving from on-premises hosted .NET applications over to the Microsoft Azure cloud environment...to be able to migrate our applications seamlessly over to the cloud was a hassle-free exercise for us,” says Gupta.

For NBAOne, the organization found that the Azure Functions would really help with acceleration and time to market because as a plug-and-play code base with easy-to-use connectors to different Azure services, it also it strips away unnecessary code and enables auto scalability, so the app can rapidly scale without needing to worry about the parameters. Additionally, with so many apps consolidated into one single app platform, NBA’s IT Application Development Group needed a way to surface relevant apps to each employee. The group used the Azure Cognitive Services Personalizer to recommend frequently used apps to users. As a ready-made service that it could use AI models with, it didn't have to train or build a model or cleanse a data set because the recommendation engine was already there and easy to integrate.

Microsoft provided both the structural support for modernization through Azure and the best practices on utilizing the digital transformation tools through the Microsoft ecosystem to bring the NBA’s vision to life. “Post modernization we've seen a real spike in usage, and one of the things that I attribute that to, is the fact that Edge services with Microsoft Azure actually reduced the page download time and increase the SEO pretty dramatically,” says Gupta. “We see this as another big victory for us.”

What NBA fans can expect next

As the NBA’s IT Application Development Group reflect on what it’s accomplished in such a brief time, the group is excited to continue improving. The team is looking forward to better utilizing the data and insights from the apps to inform their innovations. “We want to provide a more seamless and more personalized experience to our fans, as well as to make our products better, to cater to the needs of our audience. That's our number one goal,” explains Gupta. 

This goal touches all aspects of the fans’ experiences, especially regarding event management and how the NBA games as events can be improved. “We have been able to really personalize the end users’ experiences to their liking. It’s now very customized and very dynamic and responds to their favorite teams and their favorite players,” says Gupta. NBA fans can expect that the excitement of the game will continue to elevate as this team, and others across the NBA, continue to dedicate themselves to bringing the NBA experience to life.