Minnesota Wild Case Study | Loffler Managed IT Services

The Minnesota Wild’s IT department serves a long list of entities and administrative team members, including Minnesota’s professional hockey team, the Xcel Energy Center, the St Paul RiverCentre, RiverCentre Catering, the Roy Wilkins Auditorium, the TRIA practice rink down the block, Levy Restaurants, the Wild’s administrative 317 building and the Iowa Wild minor league hockey team.

The Challenge

Considering the operational needs and end users they support across multiple campuses and states, you may be surprised to learn that the Minnesota Wild’s IT team is a small crew of people, three full-time and two part-time staff members.

How do they meet all their end users’ needs with such a small team?

The Solution

The Wild offload day-to-day IT tasks to Loffler’s Managed IT Services. Loffler is second-tier support for the Minnesota Wild, meaning that when an end user brings an issue to the Minnesota Wild’s IT team that they can’t handle quickly, the request is turned over to Loffler’s IT engineers.

“Without Loffler being our second-tier support, we'd be lost,” said Mike Vevea, the Senior IT Manager for the Minnesota Wild. “We'd be sitting here spending more manpower than we could ever imagine just trying to find some of those answers that we typically know Loffler is going to pull right out of the air and fix for us in a heartbeat. That's really the meat and potatoes of Loffler support and services that they provide; they're our backbone. Without them, we'd end up ultimately crumbling.”

Loffler also supplies many tools the Wild use for their IT infrastructure and software to make them as efficient as possible. These tools include the Wild’s help desk infrastructure, ticketing system and remote control and management tools.

Special Projects: Office 365 Migration

Loffler works with the Wild’s IT team on many projects, including networking, wireless, servers and data backups.

When the Wild wanted to move their on-premise infrastructure to the cloud so their users could be more mobile, Loffler helped with an Office 365 migration.

“Loffler immediately knew where to go, what to do, how to get it done, and as quickly and as efficiently as possible,” Vevea said.

Within 90 days, Loffler had everything configured and had migrated the Wild’s 500 end users and their mailboxes to Office 365 in the cloud.

“The individual at Loffler that was helping to support the environment really just put his foot to the floor and you know, 'we're going to kick the nitro if we have to and move this thing quickly,' and they stepped up, did what they needed to do, did all the configuration in the back end. We didn't even have to touch anything within 365, which was phenomenal.”

The move to a cloud environment gave new functionality and features that made for a collaborative and mobile user community.

“We now have that functionality and that ability to be able to say, 'yeah, go home, take your equipment with you. We can still hit you up and, and remote into your equipment and do what we need to do.'”

The Results

Vevea and his team have found that with Loffler’s help they can better manage time and cut down on tasks they don’t have time to do.

“They are always willing to definitely step up to the plate,” Vevea said, “bring their 'A' game, best efforts and forge forward, constantly pushing us to get done what needs to get done and never letting their foot off the gas. Really. They're constantly going.”

The Wild's IT team now has time to take on additional projects they wouldn’t have been able to do in the past and further the Wild's mission of providing a great experience to the visitors that attend their events. Loffler is ultimately an avenue for their user community to stay productive and keep fans going.

“They’re helping us even though they don’t know it,” Vevea said. “Some of the time in providing great memories to guests that come and go from our facility. And by being that vendor on the back end supporting us, it really helps us to make sure that we’re proving those great memories to guests coming and going form our facilities.”

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