With 116 years of history, eight league titles, and an 81,000-person capacity stadium, it's surprising to hear Borussia Dortmund’s Head of Servers and Infrastructure describe it as a “medium-sized company”.
But David Kempken said the historic German football club has an IT team of just 36, dealing with internal operations and ensuring its network can handle the demand from the fans that fill the stands every week.
When Kempken started at the firm 15 years ago, the team was even smaller and less formal; one of his first projects as a trainee was building an open source Wiki for his colleagues to write technical guides in.
“To a lot of companies this is standard stuff, but we didn't have a ticketing system, we didn't have a documentation platform."
In a recent interview with The Stack at the ESET World conference in Berlin, the infrastructure lead discussed Borussia Dortmund’s (BVB) evolution, keeping the team and infrastructure agile, and his conflicted stance on open source.
