HCL Technologies signs multi year contract with Cricket Australia

Signs multi-year contract with governing body; IT major's third-largest sports deal

At a time when the ongoing men’s Cricket World Cup is keeping fans around the world busy, and emotions are running high, HCL Technologies has signed a multi-year contract with Cricket Australia, the governing body of Australian cricket.

This is India’s third-largest information technology services firm’s third biggest sports deal, after Volvo Ocean Race and Manchester United (ManU). 

Before HCL, Accenture had been working with Cricket Australia for a five-year deal from November 2013. Under the deal, HCL will provide digital experience to cricket fans, players, partners, employees, and volunteers across the country and around the world.

HCL will work on a digital core ecosystem for Cricket Australia, including properties such as the Cricket Australia Live App, cricket.com.au, bigbash.com.au, and community cricket applications such as MyCricket and community.cricket.com.au.

According to Cricket Australia, its digital platforms saw 1.4 billion global video views last season and an active social media audience of over 22 million, which it wants to further increase through its HCL partnership.

HCL did not disclose a deal value. 

“Cricket Australia is connecting with fans and participants through our digital platforms every minute of the day, through the stories and live match data on cricket.com.au, right through to participants and community volunteers using our MyCricket platform,” said Cricket Australia Chief Executive Kevin Roberts in a statement, adding that the HCL partnership will further scale up these milestones.

Given India’s emotional connect with cricket, the teams assigned to work on Cricket Australia projects are very excited. “There’s a different level of enthusiasm when you connect with a cause, not just as a matter of responsibility, but something they relate to very well,” said Swapan Johri, corporate vice-president & head-APAC Business.

The cricket-following community in Australia has more than 2 million fans attending cricket matches during the 2018-19 season. Around the world, the sport of cricket has a fan base of over 2.5 billion passionate followers.

Digitally, Cricket Australia has an online audience exceeding 20 million globally per year and has established and maintained its position as the top sports destination in Australia throughout the summer, achieving a record unique Australian audience of 2.87 million in January 2019 alone.   

“It’s (sports is) a real-time laboratory because fans are even more engaged and passionate than customers can be...our experience of working in this real-time pressure zone...ability to keep customers happy marries with our culture and heritage as a company,” said Arthur Filip, executive vice-president-sales transformation & marketing, HCL Technologies, talking about the company’s experience of working with its other sports partnerships.

A recent Forrester report on sports fan analytics noted that millennials and Gen Zers expect a different sports experience than Baby Boomers, whether they’re viewing an event live or at home on a device. 

In its ManU partnership, which HCL signed in 2015, it has helped launch a streaming platform for the football club ManU. HCL also built a visualisation engine for ManU on top of the usual platform called Opta Sports, which is usually used to provide visualisation data about the games and players.