Joao-Pierre S. Ruth, Senior EditorApril 18, 20259 Min ReadElevated view of Gillette Stadium, home New England Patriots, NFL Team. Playing against Dallas Cowboys, October 16, 2011, Foxborough, Boston, MAVisions of America LLC via Alamy Stock PhotoThe gridiron action of the New England Patriots naturally takes center stage in the public eye, but when the team’s owner, holding company The Kraft Group, wanted to update certain tech resources, the plan encompassed its extensive operations.Michael Israel, CIO for The Kraft Group, discussed with InformationWeek the plan for networking upgrades -- facilitated through NWN -- at Gillette Stadium, home field for the Patriots, as well as the holding company’s other business lines, which include paper and packaging, real estate development, and the New England Revolution Major League Soccer club.Talk us through not only the update effort for the stadium, but what were the initial thoughts, initial plans, and pain points that got the process started for the company.The roots of the business are in the paper manufacturing side. We have a paper, cardboard recycling mill in Montville, Conn. I have 10 cardboard box manufacturing plants from Red Lion, Pa. up through Dover, N.H., in the northeast. International Forest Products, which is a large commodities business which moves paper-based products all over the world. When we talk about our network, we have a standardized platform across all of our enterprise businesses and my team is responsible for maintaining and securing all of the businesses.Related:We have a life cycle attached to everything that we buy and when we look at what the next five years brings to us, we were looking and saying we have the host of networking projects coming up. It will be the largest networking set of upgrades that we do from a strategic point over that period. So, the first of which NWN is currently working on is a migration to a new voice over IP platform. Our existing platform was end-of-life, moving to a new cloud-based platform, new Cisco platform. They are managing that transition for us and that again covers our entire enterprise.[We're] building a new facility for the New England Patriots, their practice facility, which will be ready next April. Behind that we have FIFA World Cup coming in next June-July [in 2026] and we have essentially seven matches here. It’s the equivalent of seven Super Bowls over a six-week period.Behind that comes a refresh of our Wi-Fi environment, refresh of our overall core networking environment. Then it’s time for a refresh of our firewalls. I have over 80 firewalls in my environment, whether virtual or physical. And to add insult to injury, on top of all of that, we may have a new stadium that we’re building up in Everett for our soccer team, which is potentially scheduled to open in 2029 or 2030.Related:So as we were looking at all of this, the goal here is to create one strategic focus for all of these projects and not think about them individually. Sat down with NWN saying, “Hey, typically I will be managing two to three years in advance. We need to take a look at what we’re going to do over the next five years to make sure that we’re planning for growth. We’re planning to manage all of this from standards and from a central location.”Putting together what that strategic plan looks like over that period of time and building a relationship with NWN to be able to support it, augment the staff that I have. I don’t have enough resources internal to handle all of this myself. And that’s a large endeavor, so that’s where this partnership started to form.Can you describe the scale of your operations further? You mentioned hosting the equivalent of several Super Bowls in terms of operations at the stadium.If you take the stadium as a whole and we focus there for a second, for Taylor Swift concert or a FIFA event coming in -- for Taylor Swift, we had 62,000 unique visitors on our Wi-Fi network at one time. There’s 1,800 WAPs (wireless access points) supporting the stadium and our campus here now.Related:I got a note on my radio during one of the evenings saying there’s 62,000 people. I said, “How can that be? There’s only 52,000 guests.” Well, it turns out there was a TikTok challenge in one of our parking lots and there were 10,000 teenagers on the network doing TikTok. These are the things that we don’t plan for, and FIFA is going to be a similar situation where typically we’re planning for how many people are physically sitting in the stadium for a FIFA event. Our parking lots are becoming activation zones, so we’re going to have to plan to support not just who's physically entering and scanning tickets and sitting in the bowl, but who’s on the grounds as a whole.And that’s something that we haven’t had to do in the past. It’s something that some of the warmer stadiums down in the South or in the in the West Coast who host Super Bowls, they're used to that type of scenario, but there are 16 venues throughout North America that are supporting FIFA and many of them, like us, we’re not used to having that large-size crowd and your planning to support that is critical for us as we start to do this. We are now 15 months away, 14 months away. We’re in high gear right now.What led the push to make changes? The interests are of the guests to the stadium? The team’s needs? Or was it to meet the latest standards and expectations in technology and networking?If you think about the networks, and it’s kind of irrelevant whether it’s here at the stadium or in our manufacturing plants, the networks have physically been -- if it’s plugged in, if it’s a Wi-Fi attachment, etcetera, you can track what is going on and what your average bandwidth utilization is.What we were seeing over the last year with the increased adoption of AI, with the increased adoption of IoT in these environments, you’re having more devices that are missio- critical, for example, on a Wi-Fi network, whereas in the past -- OK, there’s 50,000 people in my bowl and they’re on TikTok; they’re on Instagram; they’re doing whatever. We want them to have a good experience, but it’s not mission critical in my eyes. But now, if you’re coming to the gate and we’re adopting systems that are doing facial recognition for you to enter and touching a digital wallet and shredding your ticket and hitting your credit card and doing all these things -- they need to be lightning fast.Michael IsraelIf I’m doing transactions on mobile point of sale terminals, half of my point-of-sale terminals are now mobile devices hanging off of Wi-Fi. There’s all almost 500 mobile point of sale terminals going around. If they are spinning and waiting to connect, you’re going to lose business. Same thing in my manufacturing plants where my forklifts are now connected to Wi-Fi. We’re tracking the trailers as they come in and watching for demurrage charges and looking at all of these pieces. These are these are IoT devices that weren’t on the network in the past and if the forklift isn’t connecting, the operators are not being told where to put the materials that they’re grabbing.Basically, they stop until they can reconnect. I can’t have that.The focus and the importance of the network continues to outpace what we think it’s going to do, so what I did last year is kind of irrelevant because as the applications and as the needs are inherently changing, we are society doesn’t like to wait.If someone’s looking to buy something and that point-of-sale terminal is processing and processing -- we did a project last year with autonomous purchasing, where you enter a concession stand and you pick things off the shelf, and it knows what you’re taking. Most stadiums have it at this point in time. But when we started that project, the vendor -- their merchant was actually processing in Europe and the time to get an approval was 11 seconds. If you walked up to one of my regular point-of-sale, belly-up concession stands, the approval was coming in two and a half seconds. We turned around and said you can’t wait nine seconds. People are in a queue line to get an approval on a credit card. We dug into it and found well, we’re hopping here, here, here and it’s coming from Europe.We had to get with that vendor and say, “You need to change how you’re processing.” It’s a question we hadn’t asked before, but had to get it back in line because, this is not necessarily just a technology piece here, but if you’re holding up a queue line, that’s not a satisfactory relationship. If you think about every person going into that concession stand -- 11 seconds, 11 seconds, 11 seconds -- for every six people, you’re delaying a minute. These are the things that as we’re going through planning sessions, it’s not necessarily, “Oh, it’s the latest technology, but what’s the speed of transaction, what’s the speed of throughput?”  We have to be very diligent throughout that process.How far out do you typically plan your IT budget? How often do you reassess to see what the ROI has been for a project such as this?Typically, I am looking 18 months into the future. This is one of the rare times where I'm actually looking 36 to 48 months into the future because of everything that’s kind of stacked up one after another, and I don’t have the latitude if one starts to slip that -- I can't take a 5-year set of projects and make it 9 years. I got to have the depth to say, “Hey, we’re going to finish this, but be ready because while we’re finishing up this voice over IP project, we’re now in FIFA planning. We’re now in network consolidation planning.” They’re just stacked up one after another behind that and the decisions we make now are going to impact what we’re doing in 12 months, 24 months, etcetera.Where do things stand right now in terms of this project? What’s on the road map ahead?Right now, we are in the heart of our voice over IP migration, which is the first major project we’ve set forth with NWN. We’re expecting that to be finished before football season starts. And then we’ll have an overlap of a couple of months and planning out what our core network upgrades are going to look like -- we’ll be in the planning phases, and they’ll start in late fall, early winter, right before football season ends.About the AuthorJoao-Pierre S. RuthSenior EditorJoao-Pierre S. Ruth covers tech policy, including ethics, privacy, legislation, and risk; fintech; code strategy; and cloud & edge computing for InformationWeek. He has been a journalist for more than 25 years, reporting on business and technology first in New Jersey, then covering the New York tech startup community, and later as a freelancer for such outlets as TheStreet, Investopedia, and Street Fight.See more from Joao-Pierre S. RuthReportsMore ReportsNever Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.SIGN-UPYou May Also Like