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Arizona Cardinals Team Up With CiscoThe NFL's Arizona Cardinals partner with Cisco IP.
By DAVID SIMS
TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist
The Arizona Cardinals and Insight are teaming up to run a Cisco IP Communications system throughout their training facility in Tempe and their new football stadium, scheduled to open in 2006.
The system, implemented and managed by Insight, will provide approximately 750 Cisco IP phones at the new Cardinals stadium, which will open next August of next year. In July, Insight hooked up the Cardinals' Tempe, Arizona training center with voice, data and video communications. Digital video technology operating from the converged network will, in the words of Insight officials, "allow team members to participate, via video, in real-time training sessions from both the stadium and their Tempe training facility simultaneously, which brings a new dimension to the process of game preparation." Well, if the NFL season were played online, sort of like Madden 2005 on the Internet, then training by video would mean the Cardinals'd start out Super Bowl favorites. Be a lot easier on the turf, too. Video-enabled Cisco IP phones for executives will "facilitate video conferencing and staff," allowing them to "send data, game film and marketing materials from one facility to the other, saving time and operational expenses. The systems at both facilities will be fully linked, fully integrated and fully redundant."
(What sort of industry is it where "fully redundant" is a selling point? But I digress.)
In the new stadium, Cisco IP phones with touch-screen LCDs in the stadium suites will allow fans to pick players off of a virtual roster during a game to engage in a fantasy football game. Using the phone's touch-tone color screen, fans will also be able to buy tickets for future games, shop at the Cardinals' online store, order food and beverages and pull up football statistics. And presumably check out other scores, watch ads and as much as possible recreate the home game viewing experience, except for paying $8.50 for a beer instead of getting a six-pack of premium imported beer for the price, and paying as much for your seat in nosebleed as you paid for your couch at home. This reporter thought the advantage of going to the stadium was that you didn’t have to watch little screens. I know we're all into the latest technology here, folks, and what they're doing at the new Cardinals stadium sounds state-of-the-art cool, but sometimes watching large millionaires knock each other down is its own fun.
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David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles by David Sims, please visit:
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