The Spanish  consultancy group OpenSistemas (http://www.opensistemas.com/),  leader in open source  and with a wide range of services and products based on opensource technologies, has signed an agreement with Unidad Editorial whereby they will offer advanced services of installation, configuration, hosting and maintenance of the official site in Spain of the American National Basketball League (NBA) (http://nba.marca.com) hosted in the sports portal Marca.com.

Due to the restrictions in the web platform “Stats in a Box” delivered by NBA to Marca, and not being an application developed entirely by Unidad Editorial, the multimedia group of communications has designated OpenSistemas as external provider  to  launch  and maintain the portal, that not only shows content but also, captures, extracts, and shows statistics of players and clubs in the American basketball league.

“Stats in a Box” is a platform that is automatically linked and synchronized with the IT servers of the NBA. Thus not only allowing contents like videos and information but also allowing to show the live results of all the games taking place, as well as the statistics of  all players and clubs, and the  best of the current week and season.

OpenSistemas has been collaborating with Unidad Editorial in the personalisation of the platform “Stats in a Box”, in accordance with the needs of Marca.com . An example  of this is the periodic generation of a “Rookies” page integrated in Marca.com, in order to satisfy a publicity agreement signed with BBVA, or the integration of a page of results and statistics of the players of the most important league in the world.

José Ignacio Yarza, Project Manage r said “The  system is relatively complex, but the professionalism of our collaborators at Unidad Editorial and at the NBA, has eased our work tremendously and if on top of that, you like basketball…”

Open Source technology

“Stats in a Box” is an Java EE application and OpenSistemas has opted, in accordance with its comp any  philosophy to use open source technology, to deploy it over the operating system Linux (Centos/Red Hat), Tomcat 6, Apache Web Server and MySQL 5.

For Tamara Vázques and Eva Amaral, project manager and product manager in Unidad Editorial, respectively, OpenSistemas has demonstrated a great professionalism, perseverance and efficiency both in the initial phase of the project as well as the post implantation and maintenance. “They offered us solutions adapted to our  needs  and to the particulars of this project, demonstrating a great productivity and transparency in the communication and reporting of the state of the platform”.