This weekend many of the world can be glued to televisions or smartphones as they watch the venerable Tom Brady play in his 10th Super Bowl (his first with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after 9 with New England) as he battles the a lot youthful Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. Brady can be gunning for ring No. 7 as Mahomes tries to go back-to-back for the primary time since Brady did it within the early 2000s for the Patriots.
While the groups and venues change yearly, there was one fixed for this occasion and the previous seven Super Bowls, and that’s Extreme Networks. It has been the community behind the large sport yearly since 2003. The community vendor has had an official partnership with the NFL for nearly a decade, and its community gear will be discovered in lots of stadiums, together with Gillette Stadium (Patriots), Nissan Stadium (Tennessee Titans), Lincoln Financial Field (Philadelphia Eagles) and quite a few different venues.
Recently, I had an opportunity to interview Extreme COO Norman Rice. The full dialog will be watched right here on my ZKast video podcast, accomplished along with eWEEK.
Facts and figures on Extreme and the Super Bowl
Highlights of the interview are as follows:
- Extreme is the most important enterprise community pure-play vendor, with revenues near $1 billion. The firm is one in all 4 leaders in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for wired and wi-fi LAN infrastructure.
- The firm has seen regular progress over the previous yr, even with the pandemic shaking the business up.
- In March 2020, the inventory was beneath $3/share. At the time of writing, it was $9/share, indicating higher confidence from clients and traders.
- The catalyst for progress has been the corporate’s Infinite Enterprise imaginative and prescient, coupled with the cloudification of their merchandise.
- Extreme first entered the NFL via the New England Patriots, when it was the one WiFi vendor keen to ensure community efficiency.
- This can be Extreme’s eighth consecutive Super Bowl, solely two behind the variety of appearances that QB Tom Brady has had.
- Extreme offers the WiFi infrastructure in addition to the community analytics for the sport.
- Network bandwidth has steadily grown yr over yr. In 2013 (SB XLVII) solely a few terabytes of community information was generated from solely about 15% to 20% of the followers connecting to WiFi. In 2020, WiFi visitors was north of 24TB with greater than 90% connecting through WiFi.
- The NFL prefers followers to attach over WiFi versus mobile, as it may acquire the info and carry out analytics on it. This helps them perceive the p.c of individuals utilizing the totally different social apps, enabling the NFL to focus the way it interacts with followers.
- The problem for earlier Super Bowls was making certain there was sufficient capability, and the community maintained its efficiency, notably at kickoff and halftime, when utilization was peak.
- The official attendance for Super Bowl LV can be 22,000 followers, one third of the 66,000-person capability of Raymond James Stadium, so WiFi efficiency shouldn’t be a problem.
- Super Bowl LV would be the first all-digital sport, the place cell units can be used for the whole lot from cell ticketing to buying to safety credentials. Because of COVID-19, paper tickets, money and bank cards won’t be used. Digital signage can even be used for menu boards and different use instances,…
