Networking vendor Cisco announced sponsorship deals with the NFL and with the 2024 Paris Olympics Tuesday, separate deals that should both increase the exposure of Cisco’s name in conversations about football and the Olympics in the near future.
For stadium owners and operators, the more potentially interesting deal is between Cisco and the NFL, since many NFL stadiums currently use Cisco gear and software for numerous in-venue operations, including enterprise networking, Wi-Fi, and digital signage. Deep details of the new partnership have not yet been revealed, with the press release talking only about how Cisco “will use its industry-leading expertise to jointly develop a Connected League platform with the NFL.” Requests to Cisco and the NFL for a fuller definition of what exactly a “connected league platform” would involve were not answered, leaving us to believe Tuesday’s announcement was more of a starting point for what could be a wide-ranging deal.
While the announcement also did not specify whether or not teams would get any discounts on Cisco gear under the relationship, it’s a good bet that at some point in the future there may be some kind of incentive for teams to use gear from “an official technology partner” of the league.
The “multi-year” deal, whose exact terms were not disclosed, also creates an interesting question about the future of the NFL’s existing Wi-Fi partnership deal with Extreme Networks, since Cisco and Extreme compete head-to-head in the Wi-Fi space. Extreme is heading into its ninth season as the “official Wi-FI solutions provider” to the NFL, but that deal is set to expire in March of 2022. Under the Extreme/NFL deal, teams are not required to purchase or use Extreme hardware or software; currently, 12 of the 30 NFL venues use Extreme gear exclusively for Wi-Fi.
To the best of our knowledge Cisco’s Wi-Fi gear is currently used in 12 NFL venues, including two new complete Wi-Fi 6 deployments at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.
Cisco, of course, also sells enterprise networking gear and is also behind many IPTV stadium deployments with its Cisco Vision solution, which is used at SoFi Stadium, among other venues. And according to today’s release, Cisco technology is also behind all the NFL’s instant replay operations. So the sponsorship deal in some way confirms a partnership that already exists in multiple forms at multiple touchpoints across the NFL ecosystem. What’s different now is that Cisco will get public recognition for it, through vehicles like the joined-logos graphic seen above.
Olympics deal adds to Cisco’s sports portfolio
For the Paris deal, Cisco’s involvement is more direct, as today’s announcement specifies that Cisco is the “Official Network Equipment Partner, Official Cyber Security Infrastructure Partner, and Official Conferencing Software Partner of Paris 2024 Games,” which includes both the Olympics and the Paralympics. Again, no specifics yet on how much gear will be used in how many venues, but with the wide-ranging title you can bet there is going to be a lot of Cisco technology installed ahead of the 2024 Games.
Cisco also got a lot of visibility recently via its sponsorship with the U.S. Golf Association, first at the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach and then last year, when both the men’s and women’s U.S. Opens made very visible use of Cisco’s Webex technology to facilitate socially-distanced communications.
