IMT Teams With Dell Technologies To Deliver ‘Gold Standard’ Arizona Cardinals Technology Transformation

Arizona Cardinals Vice President of Technology Erik Jones says Integrated Media Technologies and Dell Technologies delivered a ‘best-in-class’ technology transformation for the NFL team with a ‘gold standard’ of service delivery.

Erik Jones, vice president of technology for the Arizona Cardinals football team, could not be happier with the multimillion-dollar technology transformation from solution provider Integrated Media Technologies (IMT) and Dell Technologies.

In fact, Jones (pictured above) credits Dell and IMT, the superstar solution provider with a 19-year track record of successful sports, entertainment and media transformations, for delivering yet another “best-in- class” technology transformation with a “gold standard” of service delivery.

Jones worked with Dell and IMT, No. 226 on the CRN 2026 Solution Provider 500, to provide a similar technology transformation when he was vice president of technology for the Seattle Kraken NHL team.

Jones, in fact, has worked with IMT for six years and his partnership with Dell goes back a decade to when he was CIO and CTO at the University of Washington Intercollegiate Athletics.

“I trust them,” he said of Dell and IMT, which is also in the Elite 150 category of CRN’s 2026 MSP 500. “We worked so well together that we’ve come back full circle to do this again.”

To that point, Jones said the IMT-Dell solution has “transformed every aspect” of the Arizona Cardinals’ business. That includes “significant performance gains” across fan-facing technologies like ticket entry and business technologies like point of sale, he said.

Jones calls the new Dell private cloud IT estate “almost utopian,” taking the team from “multiple issues with low performance” to a highly optimized IT environment. “It has really transformed what we do from an end-user perspective but also from a business perspective day to day across all sites,” he said.

Jason Kranitz, president of IMT, a Dell Titanium partner, credits his company’s highly specialized focus on sports, entertainment and gaming with more than 30 professional sports teams as key to its success working with sports teams like the Arizona Cardinals.

In this case, the ambitious IMT Arizona Cardinals transformation comprised technology refresh, innovation and modernization for State Farm Stadium and the team’s business center and training center.

IMT’s Renowned Advanced Consulting Organization

The transformation started with a detailed assessment of the Arizona Cardinals’ IT estate by IMT’s renowned advanced consulting organization. “What makes us unique is we can really come in with a team and not just look at their IT shared services infrastructure, but everything across the board,” said Kranitz.

That IMT top consulting talent has opened up one opportunity after another for the company in the wake of high “word-of-mouth” praise from other teams in the tight-knit sports and entertainment business.

Based on the size and scale of the project, Kranitz said it was a “no-brainer” for IMT to partner with Dell on the Arizona Cardinals IT transformation.

“The simple reason is Dell has a product that basically fits almost everything that needed to be done from a requirements perspective,” Kranitz said. “It made it really easy to have one vendor, Dell, aligned with IMT that could provide a robust, comprehensive, end-to-end proposal, eliminating any type of vendor finger-pointing that might have been there before with a different storage or server vendor with broadcast storage and proprietary infrastructure.”

The decision to go all in with Dell was key to meeting Jones’ “transformation and innovation goals,” said Kranitz. “This sets the Cardinals up for the next five years so they can be driving everything they need to do from supporting the stadium to fan engagement to football analytics and beyond. This was a major, major overhaul and we are super proud of it.”

The Dell-IMT team replaced 24 disparate servers that were scattered across the IT environment with a Dell Private Cloud with 12 Dell PowerEdge R series servers and three Dell PowerStore 500Ts in a 100 percent VMware virtualized environment with Dell PowerProtect, Dell AI Data Platform, Dell PowerProtect Data Domain and Data Manager and Dell Cyber Recovery with Dell Cyber Detect.

IMT also replaced proprietary broadcast infrastructure with a Dell H710 PowerScale cluster along with a PowerScale A310 cluster at a disaster recovery site.

The ‘Real Story Is Dell Private Cloud’

“The real story here is Dell Private Cloud and the ability to take all three sites—the stadium, the business center and the training center—and put the right number of PowerEdge R660 servers and PowerStore 500Ts perfectly sized for each location with the ability to support a shared services model with storage protection across each location,” said Kranitz.

That buildout also includes Dell PowerScale SmartSync data replication with the ability to archive to AWS S3 Glacier Deep archive. “We have one PowerScale replicating to the other PowerScale for backup/disaster recovery and the archive is pushed out to the public cloud,” he said.

“All of the Cardinals’ structured and unstructured data is now on brand-new hardware that is multisite and protected with disaster recovery,” said Kranitz. “With that foundation in place as they grow, their data is protected and they have the ability to do what they need to do for game day production, broadcast and IT shared services. This was a major overhaul and a major migration without a hitch.”

The IMT and Dell team started the migration last summer and had it completed in April, paving the way for the new modernized infrastructure to be active for the current NFL season.

The high-level support from Dell to meet the Cardinals’ expectations was “exceptional,” said Kranitz. “Dell is the one vendor far and away that is making lead times and supply chain less of an issue than others,” he said. “Dell is a tremendous partner for us, and their supply chain advantages really do help.”

A Tight Partnership Between Dell, IMT And The Cardinals

Erik Day, senior vice president and general manager of small and medium business for Dell Technologies, who worked on the project side by side with IMT and the Cardinals, credited the tight partnership between Dell, IMT and the Cardinals for the success of the transformation.

“The fit here between the partner, Dell and the customer worked really well,” he said. "We say this a lot: ‘Yes, it’s about the technology. Dell Technologies has the best technology in the market, but when you are able to build a relationship and work together to give the customer exactly what they need it makes all the difference in the world.’”

Day said he sees the Cardinals’ IT modernization setting up the company for success with AI workloads in the future. “That is one of the biggest success stories of this partnership,” he said.

Kranitz says technology transformations for sports teams in the AI era are not for the faint of heart. “In this case, the Arizona Cardinals decided that IT was going to be a strength for them so they could set themselves up in the future for being best of breed for football analytics and everything they are trying to accomplish,” he said. “The teams making these investments are on the leading edge of technology. That’s a really big deal.”

Kranitz sees a bright future with a “massive opportunity” ahead for his company, which has completed other sports teams’ transformations with Dell, to work with Dell on future technology transformations.

No Limit To The Dell-IMT Partnership With AI Future

“Our focus and core is unstructured data, video and how that is morphing into AI so the opportunity is bigger than it has ever been,” Kranitz said. “There’s really no limit to where the IMT and Dell partnership can go given Dell’s supply chain and its ability to absolutely crush the challenge of delivering the right compute with the right amount of GPUs with the PowerScale platform integrating flawlessly into their AI data platform and the Dell AI Factory.”

Kranitz is projecting 50 percent growth in his company’s Dell business this year based on the explosion of AI and unstructured data. “The art of live sports and the ratings they draw across all the different professional sports leagues is not slowing down,” he said.

IMT’s unique managed services capabilities and its application integration expertise set the company apart in the sports market, said Kranitz.

“Being a leader in the application stack as well as the infrastructure stack and the cloud stack really sets IMT apart,” he said. “We continue to do these projects on a consistent basis. Word of mouth is everything. In this market, you need to be perfect. That’s why we’ve been doing this for 19 years.”

Jones, for his part, calls IMT a “leader” in the sports media technology business. “They are one of the few I would trust to deliver such a system in this environment,” he said.

Jones complimented IMT and Dell for completing the highly strategic project on time and on budget under a tight timeline. “There is nothing more that I could have asked of them,” he said.

As to the importance of the partnerships with companies like IMT and Dell in the technology business, Jones said: “We are in a business of building trust through our partnerships and relationships, but ultimately with the technologies and applications that we deliver. That is tantamount to everything that we do.”