Friday, March 14, 2014

Vivek Ranadive Eyes Billions in Sacramento Kings





I am less intrigued about the high stakes investment that Vivek Ranadive & Co. plopped down on the Sacramento Kings, and more intrigued about what Ranadive himself has done and how he thinks.  
Ranadive can perhaps be best described as a genius numbers guy who can meld mathematics and technology to solve problems and inform like no other sports owner. His success with Tibco, the software company he founded in 1985, transformed Wall Street by enabling traders to use data in real time by replacing batch processing with real-time processing. Today, Tibco’s software powers most trading floors.
He sounds very much like a man of the 21st century.  Who's whip-smart, and who sees the possibility of media, technology and algorithms (mathematics), and can make it all happen.
Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadive is bringing a technological revolution to sports that is going to make his NBA team worth “billions of dollars” within the next decade.
He is confident he can monetize the Kings as a huge social network.  The thinking isn't exactly new, at least not anymore and not in our day and age: It's to pull disparate data together, and make it available, for example, to traders, in real-time.  This way, they can make more time-efficient, no doubt better decisions on the trading floor.  This underpins the business model for TIBCO, which Ranadive plans to do with a more technologized, digitized Kings team vis-a-vis its fans.  IBM is already in this space, such as with tennis.

But if Ranadive & Co. can pull it off, as he has surmised and projected, it will definitely be a coup.  Much as he acted quickly to nail down this investment, he is patient about realizing an ROI.  This is uncharacteristic of many people and organizations in the 21st century.  So let's see.

Refer back to this article in 2024!


Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD

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