If you live in the United States, you probably can’t escape the SuperBowl phenomenon. As a French citizen, I can’t really relate, but I know one thing: it’s BIG!

About a month ago, one of the WSO2 marketing team members launched what he thought was a crazy idea: use our products to predict who would win the big game. And what happened next is a great example of how WSO2 works. We just love crazy ideas 🙂

A bunch of people reacted and not only marketing people. Why? Because 99% of internal communications are public ones, meaning everybody has access to them. The WSO2 Machine Learner team of course, but also Kern from Sales, a football fan: his knowledge was critical to gather the necessary data to build the prediction model. One in particular: injuries are one of the critical factors which decide the fate of a team.

And then frantic work began: while our engineers and data scientists worked on building and proving the model  with the historical data they had found online, the marketing team worked relentlessly to build the web site that would host the prediction, mostly on their personal time. After all, this was not a planned activity! But everybody bought into the idea and helped as much as they could. Logo design, the web page implementation, the first model.. all is completed in just 3 weeks, including over the holiday period.

The reason I love this story is because it reflects so much on how we work: the open culture which has empowered Saliya to step up and throw his idea, the commitment of the engineering team to help realize the idea, the passion of the marketing team to release this on time for the first games. We had not planned for this, we just did it. Well, they did it, because all I have done personally is watching in awe the deployment progressing at giant steps.

Stories like this are one of the many reasons I love my work.

Want to play and try some predictions ? Connect here . Want to know how we did it ? Read this.