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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