| In April, the Kraft Group—which owns the New England Patriots, MLS’ New England Revolution and Gillette Stadium—signed a five-year agreement with tech infrastructure provider NWN to transform the tech framework for the Kraft Group’s facilities, including Gillette Stadium and a new training facility for the Patriots. I talked to Kraft Group CIO Michael Israel and NWN CEO Jim Sullivan in April about the challenges of bringing the latest technology infrastructure to a place like Gillette Stadium, and how big facilities with a multitude of uses can plan for the future. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. A longer version is available here. How do you come up with what you want to accomplish, and how do you figure out what kind of infrastructure is needed to make it happen? Israel: We have our Monster Jam [this weekend] at the stadium. On Saturday, I’ll be walking around the stadium engaging. Gillette is one of the few stadiums in the country in which we own and self-operate our stadium. It’s our security staff, our concession staff. I am walking around watching how our fans engage with us. How are our systems being used? Where are they inefficient? Where are they doing their job? How can we improve that experience? Guests will come up to me and say, ‘How do I get to the gate?’ ‘How do I get to my suite?’ ‘Where’s the nearest bathroom?’ When they’re asking me these things, that’s registering in my mind: They don’t have that information today. When you have these types of events, they’re new users. You want them to have a positive experience because that’s your lead in to a potential soccer season ticket holder or future Patriots season ticket holder. But even when you get to the Patriot season ticket holders, what can we do to enhance that experience? It’s seeing how our guests experience things, what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong, and not sitting back and saying, ‘I’m good. I’m going to go watch the game.’ I’ve been here six years. I think I’ve seen 15 minutes of one football game. On a football day, I’ll generally do about 30,000 steps walking the stadium, watching what’s going on. The other side of the coin is what do we do from a technology perspective, looking at what do I need to do to ensure that I have connectivity, and what devices are now connecting to the networks that hadn’t in the past? The system that waters the field is an IoT system that’s attached to our network. If it’s not connecting, it’s not watering the field, and we don’t know what’s going on. We have to allow for connectivity, secure that connectivity, and make sure that that connectivity is reliable. We constantly do surveys after a winter to say, what got impacted by the winter? Do I have Wi-Fi access points that may be misaligned that need to be looked at? I have FIFA coming in next year. That’s like having seven Super Bowls over six weeks here at the stadium. They’re going to use my parking lots on the east and west side as fan activation zones. I don’t have connectivity there. Working with the NWN team, we have to determine what does FIFA need? How do we light up those areas that when the fans are there, they have connectivity. Their booths can operate, their systems can operate, the fans can get connectivity, and we’ll have maybe 50,000 or 60,000 fans in the bowl, but we could have an additional 50,000 people on the campus, and that’s not a crowd that we’re used to having. On the NWN side, how do you determine what to do in large facilities like these and how to support current and future needs? Sullivan: NWN, over the past five years, has grown from $250 million to over $1 billion dollars this year, and really expanded this full end-to-end IT infrastructure. The market is changing really fast with AI adding in. For us, it’s working with organizations to start with the end state: What’s the vision of what we have to have here, what we’re trying to drive? And then, what’s the required capabilities? Most of these environments, from the application, to the AI, to the infrastructure, to the unified communications, to security all have to be assessed as one holistic solution. Then we put in the right required capabilities from the technology, the services, the overall management, and co-management with Mike’s team. We’ve reached the breadth and scale where we’re dealing with organizations where there’s hundreds of thousands of people, or states with 50,000 deployments of people and requirements. We can cover end-to-end, but also have the scale to handle a large project that goes across multiple technology domains and supports a smaller event, and all of a sudden it surges to hundreds of thousands of people. Everyone is getting used to [the fact] that customer experience needs to be world-class; there’s expectations there. Ultimately, the Wi-Fi is going to be fast, strong and secure. And then going into these new technologies to a real beneficial evolution, where it’s creating new user experience, new knowledge, but is also driving a backend that’s going to create a lot more capacity demands on the networks, on the infrastructure. You’ve got to be able to tie it all together. What advice do you have for CIOs looking to bring more technology to their facilities, thinking about not only what to do today, but what to do in the future? Israel: Ultimately, it’s not just if you build it, they will come. If you’re building it, you need to be brainstorming how you’re going to use it, and you need to have relationships with all of your stakeholders to understand what's holding them back, what would they like to see? In some cases, they don’t know what they don’t know, and we have to take these technology discussions, take the technology out of it, and think about how are we going to provide solutions. Sullivan: We did 5,000 distinct deployments last year. The really successful ones are driven with a positive outcome you’re trying to get to. Collaboration and a partnership between the two as a seamless team really drives the most success to drive those outcomes. |
