What the San Diego Padres CIO does to deliver major league IT experiences
Executive Take
Chan built infrastructure for peak capacity years before results justified it, and that early bet is what lets new features ship fast now. Treat your busiest day as the baseline, not the exception.
Executive Summary
Padres CIO Ray Chan built Petco Park's IT around a converged network from Verizon (DAS) and Extreme Networks (Wi-Fi) supporting ticketing, payments, IPTV, and operations. The venue hosts nearly 400 annual events, runs cashless, uses the MLB Ballpark app for entry and payments, and is piloting facial-authentication entry via MLB's Go Ahead Entry program.
Why It Matters
Technology leaders can copy this pattern directly. A single resilient network backbone, built for peak load instead of average use, makes every new digital feature cheaper and faster to add later.
Bizquad Perspective
The real lesson isn't the facial recognition gate, it's that Chan spent a decade building boring, invisible network capacity before any flashy feature could work.