Changeup

COVER UPDATE

Changeup

Scout Advisor Corp. has improved its software products for

professional scouts and looks forward to branching into other sports.

Tampa-based Scout Advisor Corp. finished 2008 with the same number of professional baseball team clients: 15.

But it made some significant additions to its software, which helps scouts organize information about prospects.

Those changes, which include video storage, should position the company to capture more baseball teams and branch into football, which has traditionally used more video than statistics-heavy baseball in its scouting work.

The company, fresh from a four-day December visit at the winter professional baseball meetings in Las Vegas, where it had an invitation-only hospitality suite, is also rebranding itself with a new logo. Gone are the two diamond logos - symbolizing its baseball roots.

The new logo is more abstract: two overlapping rectangles, which could represent football fields, basketball courts, soccer fields, hockey rinks or baseball fields.

The new tagline: "Scout Advisor Corp. Scouting. Extended."

Winter is the big sales season for Scout Advisor, because it is the off-season for baseball, a time when some spending decisions are made before spring training begins in February. It is also the end of the football season, when teams are making plans for next year.

The new products Scout Advisor launched in late 2008 were Scout Advisor Data Pro, an add-on data search and reporting tool. It is a Web-based tool the front office uses to mine data. It merges publicly available data on new players, plus proprietary data. Teams use the information to make decisions on buying or trading players.

"It's like a magnifying glass into the system," says Mike Morizio, chief executive officer. The company has sold the new product to six baseball teams.

A second new product, launched in September, is a video scouting software called Scout Advisor On-Demand Video. Scouts with cameras can upload video into their electronic scouting files. They don't need to use the base Scout Advisor software with the new video software.

Baseball scouts had been using video, but secondarily, behind statistics. Now baseball scouts are using video more, to evaluate young talent. Scout Adivisor has proposals on the video software out to two baseball teams.

A third new offering is Scout Advisor Voice Recognition, which is a new offering in the updated Scout Advisor base software package.

This offering, which the company began marketing in August, allows scouts to read in their notes into the microphone on their computer. Three teams have bought this add-on product.

Scout Advisor has visited NFL teams and is waiting a decision on two formal written proposals with two football teams. This would be a 2009 initiative for these teams.

The new products allow Scout Advisor to take advantage of an evolution in professional scouting: a merger of analysis, statistics and video. The company has yet another new software to add to the package, but it wouldn't reveal it yet.

"We are in the middle of it," Morizio says.

In the past six months, the company has also hired two software developers, based in Boston and Northern Virginia, and is up to six full-time employees and a handful of contractors, all in touch with the company headquarters on Harbor Island in downtown Tampa.

It is also talking to teams in the NHL and NBA.

- Dave Szymanski