Early this season we took a look at the Washington Redskins during our NFL Tech Series and looked at the additions to FedEx Field as well as the new solar initiative at the stadium.
Well, BizTech Magazine just had an exclusive sit-down with Asheesh Kinra, the Redskins VP of information technology, and Sonny Sun, Redskins IT manager who gave a lot of great insight about the new technology additions that have been added at FedEx Field.
A few of the highlights are:
- Kinra and Sun built a blazingly fast wireless network at Redskins Park, the organization’s headquarters and practice facility in Ashburn, Va. The deployment allowed coaches to replace paper playbooks with iPads and give the team a competitive edge.
- Kinra and his four IT staffers also completed a two-year project in which they replaced two aging phone systems that crashed repeatedly with a more reliable Voice over IP (VoIP) system. The new technology (installed at Redskins Park and FedExField, the team’s 79,000-seat stadium in Landover, Md.) features many unified communications (UC) capabilities, including the ability for employees to route office calls to their mobile phones.
- By the spring of 2011, the team had had enough, and Kinra consulted with CDW to find a solution. He and his staff briefly considered several VoIP vendors, and even flirted with the idea of a cloud-based phone system, but because the Redskins had previously standardized on Cisco Systems for its network, it was an easy decision to go with Cisco’s UC phone system, Kinra says. For about six months, a team of CDW experts helped the Redskins design the new phone system. CDW Corporate Account Manager Steve Hurst and two solution architects visited the Redskins several times and had about a dozen more meetings over the phone.
- The new UC phone system is much easier to manage. Using web-based software, the IT staff can remotely configure and manage the system. Adding, moving or transferring a phone line is also a piece of cake. In the past, adding a new phone extension would take 30 minutes. Today, says Sun, it takes as little as one to five minutes because it’s IP-based. “Now we just have to plug a phone into a network jack, and it’s almost instantaneous.”
The article also goes into how the staff is looking into WiFi upgrades as well as iPads for the players for each week’s game plan that used to be printed on hundreds of pieces of paper. Now with the upgraded technology the players can download the game-plan on their IPad on Tuesday night’s of game week and have already studied it when they report to the facility on Wednesday morning to implement it.
With technology enabling teams to do business more efficiently and cost-effectively, individuals like Kinra and Sun will be commonplace with not only NFL teams, but teams of all leagues.
Find the full article at BizTech Magazine here.
