I have lived in Florida for over 20 years and serve as the General Manager for Lumen Technologies. Starting with the announcement in March 2020 that Tom Brady would bring his talents to Florida, all eyes were on Tampa Bay. We have a strong sense of community here, and suddenly, this region landed at the center of the sports world. Months after the Lightning won the Stanley Cup and the Rays advanced to the World Series, the Buccaneers have moved on to the Big Game.

Lumen plays a role in this region’s journey to the future and the Bucs’ journey to the Big Game. Raise the flags!

Ready For The Big Game

Lumen has been the technology and communications provider to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for the past eight years.  We are thrilled they are the first professional football team in history to play in the championship game on their home field, Raymond James Stadium. We know a lot about that stadium because we recently helped the Buccaneers upgrade the underlying technology that creates the fan experience – both in the stadium and at their World Headquarters. We brought together a mix of solutions to empower the organization’s use of massive amounts of data, connect Raymond James with their training facility, and avoid bottlenecks for fan data at peak usage periods. It is all built on the Lumen platform of adaptive networking, edge cloud, connected security and collaboration technologies.

We know a lot about that Big Game too. For the past 32 years Lumen has played a global role in each Big Game. This year Lumen estimates that more than 1,400 hours of video content will be acquired, encoded, and transported across the Lumen® Vyvx® platform and managed by its Vyvx Operations as part of game-day coverage.

My team and I will cheer on the Bucs. Any tickets we had available, my staff gave away to first responders, local military and a Make a Wish child. So, we’ll do our cheering from home.

And there is more cheering to do for many other great enterprises in the region.

So, What Is Your Big Game?

There are close to 40 Fortune 1000 companies that call Florida their home, all of which are leveraging various Lumen solutions.  So, the Buccaneers are not alone in recognizing that their business is changing. Customers don’t think in terms of a single piece of infrastructure anymore. The conversations we have now are about business challenges and opportunities.

Sometimes challenges and opportunities blur into each other. This last year threw many plans into the air and some long-term goals were vastly accelerated.  Florida has a significant retail vertical that needed to go touchless and cashless virtually overnight. Healthcare providers needed to quickly scale their bandwidth and seek solutions for outsourced call centers to manage vaccine scheduling. Financial institutions had to continue to securely support new lending, refinancing, and trading volumes, in the middle of a crisis. We’re proud to be part of those teams too.

We have a very fiber rich infrastructure throughout Florida, and our customers are now looking to us beyond just traditional network. We are partnering with clients every day to understand how they are using data and can apply the Lumen platform of integrated network, compute, security and collaboration services to acquire, analyze and act on data faster. We are poised to help organizations modernize their business and fully utilize technology to drive success.

I love Florida. My office looks out on the beach. I love the water, the people and the strong sense of community. And this community’s dynamism goes beyond sports.