REDSKINS CALL AN AUDIBLE
COMPANY: Washington Redskins
LOCATION: Ashburn, Va.
EMPLOYEES: 300 to 350, depending on time of year
TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT STAFF: Five full-time employees
HISTORY: The Washington Redskins is a professional football team in the National Football League. First based in Boston and initially named the Braves, the team moved to Washington, D.C., in 1937. The organization, which plays its home games at FedExField in Landover, Md., is a three-time Super Bowl champion.
At a Glance
To upgrade its communications infrastructure, the Washington Redskins go state-of-the-art with a new UC and wireless systems rollout, including the Apple iPad.
Adding, moving or transferring a phone line is a piece of cake, thanks to the Redskins’ new VoIP phone system, say Vice President of IT Asheesh Kinra and IT Manager Sonny Sun.
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Asheesh Kinra doesn’t throw touchdown passes, kick
field goals or sack quarterbacks. But when it comes to
technology, his fingerprints are all over the Washington
Redskins’ success on and off the field.
Last year, Kinra, the Redskins’ vice president of IT, and
his team 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.
This past summer, 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 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.
The new communications infrastructure
provides coaches, players, team executives
and office employees with
the mobility, uptime and
quality of service they need to
communicate and collaborate
effectively, says Kinra.
“The players and coaches
love the iPads. They can roam
around, go from one meeting to
another, and study the playbook
and watch game video,” he says.
“As for VoIP, communication is
obviously key to any business.
When customers call, our phone
lines need to work. And on game
day, our coaches in the booth
have to be able to call down to the
sidelines to talk to players.”
By investing in tablets,
Wi-Fi and UC, the Redskins
are addressing several issues
that companies of all sizes
are grappling with today: the
increased popularity of mobile
devices; the need to upgrade
infrastructure to support
growing bandwidth demands;
and employees’ desire for
communications tools to improve productivity, simplify IT
support and reduce costs.
Communications Huddle In 2011, the Redskins’ two traditional phone systems were
in bad shape. At FedExField, the voicemail system for its
then 15-year-old public branch exchange system crashed
several times during the year, frustrating employees and
fans alike. With voicemail down, for example, the team
could not provide callers with automated greetings for
stadium directions, ticket sales and other important
information, says Redskins IT Manager Sonny Sun.
A key reporting system that logged inbound and
outbound calls no longer worked, preventing sales
managers from tracking worker productivity. In
addition, the team charges vendors for
phone usage, but executives had difficulty
knowing how much to bill them without
accurate records, Kinra says.
The PBX at Redskins Park, 48 miles
away, had also reached end of life. It
crashed about every three months,
resulting in dead phone lines
for hours at a time, Sun adds.
The voicemail system’s small
hard drive reached capacity
every two to three months,
forcing the IT staff to drop
whatever they were doing to
delete voicemails.
By the spring of 2011, the
team had had enough. Kinra
consulted with CDW. He and
his staff briefly considered
several VoIP vendors, even
flirting with the idea of a
cloud-based phone system.
But because the Redskins had
previously standardized on
Cisco Systems networking, it
became 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
“The phone system has run 24/7, and voice quality has
increased dramatically.” — Redskins Vice President of IT Asheesh Kinra
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Securing Tablets and VoIPThe Washington Redskins’ digital playbooks, distributed
on iPads to players, coaches and scouts, are much more
secure than paper playbooks thanks to mobile device
management software. If the tablets get lost or stolen, IT
staff can remotely erase all the data on the devices using
AirWatch’s cloud-based MDM software, says Asheesh
Kinra, the team’s vice president of IT. Using MDM, IT locks
down the iPads, making only three applications accessible to
players: a playbook, video for watching game footage, and
email for communicating with coaches. Players cannot surf
the web or download apps. To further bolster security, Kinra
has created a policy to remotely wipe the iPads if a player or
coach mistypes his password five times.
The Redskins also took measures to protect the team’s
new Cisco Voice over IP system, specifically the Cisco
IP Communicator application on employees’ notebook
computers. The team requires two-factor authentication
before employees can connect to a virtual private network
to access Cisco IP Communicator, says Sonny Sun, the
Redskins IT manager.
architects visited the Redskins several times and had about
a dozen more meetings over the phone.
During the planning process, the Redskins’ IT staff
surveyed each department in the organization as well as
stadium vendors regarding their phone system needs.
As requirements changed, CDW adapted and revised the
designs, says Michele Marx, a CDW UC solution architect.
“Going onsite is important because it gives us a better
understanding of the customer’s needs,” she says.
The overall design included an upgrade of the company’s
existing network, multiple Cisco UCS servers to run the
new phone system, three different types of Cisco IP phones
and Cisco Contact Center Express call center software for
the ticketing office, says CDW UC Solutions Architect Rahul
Mathur.
“The network was out of date, so we designed a network
refresh with new switches that could support VoIP,” he says.
The Migration With CDW’s assistance, the Redskins IT staff installed the
new phone system over a two-year period. In early 2012,
the IT team upgraded the network, while a CDW engineer
installed the new phone system at both Redskins Park
and FedExField. Over a single weekend, Kinra and his staff
moved every user at Redskins Park to VoIP, but decided to
take a phased migration approach at the stadium.
In the first year, the IT staff migrated the stadium’s
business users. The team then spent several months last
spring switching all remaining phones at the stadium — in the
luxury suites, the press box and concession stands — to VoIP.
The team purchased IP phones for its employees, but for
game day functions —concessions, elevators, media, guest
service and suites — the team continues to use analog
phones. To do so, they installed Cisco VG224 analog voice
gateways, which connect the analog phones to the VoIP
system, Kinra says.
Kinra and his staff implemented everything with high
availability and good voice quality in mind.
While upgrading the corporate network, for example,
Sun replaced one old core switch at FedExField with two
new Catalyst 6506-E core switches. He also upgraded
the network edge with new Cisco Catalyst 3560 Series
switches — 17 at FedExField and six at Redskins Park. The
new switches support Power over Ethernet so the team
can use an Ethernet connection to power the IP phones.
To ensure good voice quality, Sun set up a Virtual LAN to
prioritize voice traffic over data traffic.
With the network upgraded, the Redskins installed Cisco
Unified Communications Manager software, which handles
call processing and serves as the foundation for Cisco’s
family of UC services. They also implemented Cisco Unity
Connection, a unified messaging application.
A CDW engineer deployed Cisco’s communications
software as virtualized applications on three Cisco
UCS C-Series rack servers. Two servers were installed
at FedExField and another at Redskins Park, so if the
equipment failed at one site, the other site would keep the
phone system up and running, Kinra says.
With the project complete, the team is now reaping the
benefits of VoIP. “The phone system has run 24/7, and voice
quality has increased dramatically,” he says.
The new UC phone system is much easier to manage.
Using web-based software, the IT staff can remotely
configure and manage the system. For Redskins
employees, it enables vastly improved communications
and allows them to be as mobile in the workplace as
Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III is on the football
field. “Now we just have to plug a phone into a network jack,
and it’s almost instantaneous,” Kinra says.
iPad Playbooks Washington was among a dozen NFL teams that embraced
digital playbooks in 2012.
Instead of spending hours making paper copies of
playbooks each week, coaches can now electronically
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deliver them to players’ iPads. For the players, a tablet is
not only more lightweight, but also provides them with
everything they need — playbooks, video footage and
email from coaches — at their fingertips.
To support the mobile technology, the team deployed
one Cisco 5508 Wireless Controller and 26 Cisco Aironet
3600 Series access points that support the 802.11 b/g/n
standard on both the 2.4 gigahertz and 5Ghz wireless
bands. For redundancy, it also installed a wireless
controller at the stadium that the practice facility’s access
points (APs) can failover to.
A CDW engineer performed a radio frequency site
survey to determine the optimal locations for installing
the APs. He also configured the controller and APs, while
the Redskins IT staff installed the equipment.
With the wireless network up and running, the team
issued 125 third-generation 64 gigabyte iPads to coaches,
players and scouts during training camp in summer 2012.
The devices have been a big hit. Players are studying their
playbooks more thanks to the iPads, so they’re better
prepared for games every week, Kinra says.
Another big benefit is the ability for coaches to change
game plans on the fly. Before a meeting, for example, a coach
can add five plays, upload them to the server, and have them
automatically downloaded to selected players’ iPads.
Future StrategyDespite all the tech improvements put in place over
the past two years, the Redskins continue to push the
envelope.
For fans, Kinra and his staff are now working hard to beef
up the Wi-Fi network at FedExField with several hundred
APs. In the future, he wants to upgrade the stadium’s
distributed antenna system to improve cell phone service
as well. Next year, the defending NFC East champions will
introduce a new mobile app to provide fans with more real-
time stats, video replays and other features.
“We are looking at a lot of different options now to
increase the technology to better accommodate our
fans,” Kinra says.
Internally, now that the Cisco VoIP implementation
is complete, the IT team plans to introduce additional
UC technologies. They’ve rolled out instant messaging
to Redskins executives and coaches, and will make
the feature available companywide next year. The IT
department also plans to begin testing video conferencing
features next year. Pho
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“Now we just have to plug a phone into a network jack, and it’s almost instantaneous.” — Redskins IT Manager Sonny Sun
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