By Paul Desmond
Network World, 07/23/01
On a Monday in late April, Gerry Louw, CTO for World Wrestling
Federation Entertainment's New Media Network, is sitting in his corner office,
the one with the XFL Hitmen football shirt hanging on the hook and the four
boxes containing Stone Cold Steve Austin electronic action figures perched
on a top shelf. Louw is answering a reporter's questions when the phone
rings. On the line is the New Media Network president, seeking figures on
capital expenditures.
This would be wholly unremarkable if the person asking for
those numbers wasn't Shane McMahon, aka Shane-O Mac, professional wrestler.
Shane is the son of Linda and Vince McMahon, founders of WWF Entertainment.
He is also the man who the night before jumped from 50 feet above the ring
to body-slam an opponent as part of the Backlash pay-per-view special. Shane,
rather than just being happy he can still walk, is now concerned about budgets.
How weird is that?
Louw says he doesn't see McMahon as a superstar wrestler,
even though he is. "I know him as Shane, and he's my boss and that's
it," Louw says. "Although when you see him, it's like, 'How does your
head feel after that knock with a chair?'"
While the nature of its business is certainly out of the ordinary,
in many respects New Media Network and its parent company are not unlike other
family businesses in which the principals wear many hats. The three McMahons,
along with Shane's sister Stephanie, are all involved in the entertainment
and business sides of the house.
Like
their wrestlers, the family faces a demanding schedule with lots
of travel, given the 240 live events the WWF stages each year.
But their work ethic apparently trickles down. Louw and his staffers
go the extra mile, whether it's checking Web traffic statistics
during a busy weekend or coming in at 6:30 a.m. to get some quiet
time at work. Louw typically works from about 8:30 a.m. till 6:30
or 7 p.m., usually straight through lunch. In fact, Louw estimates
he's only gone out for lunch about five times in two years.
New Media Network only has about 50 employees, yet it is the
No. 1 independent provider of streaming media on the Internet, Louw says,
with 8.5 million videostreams served each month, from about 60 Web sites.
Oh, the drama
Streaming media is key for WWF content. "Think of it as
a sports soap opera," Louw says. As in a soap opera, a number of ever-changing
story lines progress simultaneously. Video clips, most about 50 seconds long,
keep fans up to date.
Eight engineers who report to Louw make it all happen.
They run a network of 40 Web, database and application servers,
a combination of Sun E420s and Compaq ProLiant DL360s, all hosted
at a Level 3 Communications site in New York. Traffic comes in
via two 1G bit/sec pipes, with load balancing provided by dual
Alteon WebSystems Alteon 184 devices. A pair of Cisco Catalyst
6509 switches completes the hardware picture.
But it's the software that really makes WWF sites
tick. Sites come and go to coincide with story lines, and the
content on even the mainstay sites such as wwf.com
and www.wwfsuperstars.com
changes rapidly. It's not uncommon to get a story-line change
in advance of an event with less than a few hours notice. On top
of that, the main wwf.com site is redesigned about twice per year
to keep it fresh.
To deal with these changes, the New Media team developed a
content management tool, dubbed Rapid Fire. The tool lets content developers
quickly design and populate a site, taking the technology team out of that
loop.
Louw says he knew nothing of WWF story lines, "nor was it
a requirement," when he came on board two years ago. Now he says he needs
to know enough so he can prepare for the traffic spikes that inevitably follow
major pay-per-view events. Even a mention of the wwf.com site during the nine
hours of weekly television programming the company produces can cause a spike
from 10,000 to 100,000 users. To keep up, Louw is briefed weekly by the content
team.
One gets the impression that Louw knows the content better
than he lets on, referring to the story line of the previous night's pay-per-view
special as, "obviously very controversial." That event helped New
Media set a new monthly high-water mark, with about 320 million page views.
Given that each view comprises about 50 HTTP requests, that comes to 1.5 billion
HTTP requests for the month.
"If I switch video players from Microsoft to Real, I can
turn the market by 5%," Louw says. "We wield a big stick."
That he does, but for the most part Louw doesn't wield it
when it comes to dealing with his staff. While Louw isn't afraid to say
when he's not happy about a particular issue, he is genuinely appreciative
of the work his staff does and tries to let them know it.
Off-hours excitement
At the weekly Monday morning staff meeting, the first question
for each of his staff is, "How was your weekend?" If he forgets
to ask at the beginning, he apologizes before asking later. One of the topics
this week is where to go for a staff weekend excursion. White-water rafting
comes up, and Louw suggests parachuting. Then he goes off on a tangent about
going to the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, to mixed reviews. "Well,
I'm going to the running of the bulls," he says. "You guys are invited."
Louw seems to go after everything full-bore. Ask him about
his hobbies and he'll tell you he's "an extreme snowboarder wannabe,"
having taken up the sport this winter. Likewise, he's an "avid fly fisherman,"
having taken that up way back in 1999.
Maybe it's no surprise, then, that Louw can relate to the
nearly rabid fan base that is the WWF's business. He's held high-profile
IT positions before, including a stint as CTO of Agency.com, where he grew
the technology team from two to 194 people. But the WWF is different,
a realization driven home when he attended his first live event.
"To walk into a stadium where there are 30,000
fans and to see how they react to that content, and to realize
we provide a service to them, it's an incredible feeling,"
Louw says. "It's an inherent belief here that we have a business
because of the fans. The fans are No. 1. So the quality of service
I deliver to those fans is key."
Desmond is editor of ecomSecurity. com, a security information
source for IT managers, CIOs and business executives. He can be reached at paul_desmond@king-content.com.
