You work where?

We visit NFL Films, the San Diego Supercomputer Center and The Kodak Theatre for a look at three of the cool places you work.

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Carrying football footage

NFL Films San Diego Supercomputer Center TeraGrid Kodak Theatre

Walk into the headquarters of NFL Films and you get a sense of achievement. A lobby display showcases dozens of Emmy Awards for sports programs. Move through the building and signs of creativity abound: Editors work busily on film footage while technicians prepare a sound stage for an audition. And, of course, football is everywhere - from cafeteria trays bearing images of gridiron greats to hundreds of photos of star players and memorabilia lining the walls.

Just the place for an unabashed football fan who has a background in creative writing - Steve Eager, director of network and systems administration. Eager says he thrives in this setting, and his professional achievements bear that out.

Eager joined NFL Films in December 1994, when the IT "infrastructure" was a minicomputer and three stand-alone PCs, and the entire IT department comprised himself and the CIO, Dave Franza. Since then, Eager has helped NFL Films shift to networked PCs and Macs for production, managed the construction and operation of temporary computer networks at five Super Bowls, and designed the network at the new 200,000-square-foot headquarters complex in Mount Laurel, N.J., the company opened last September.

Eager, 40, began his career in 1985 as a credit analyst at First Fidelity Bank. Intrigued by a program used to analyze financial statements, Eager worked to improve its reporting capabilities. That took him to the MIS department, where he developed various financial reporting programs. "It was far more interesting than analyzing financial statements," he says.

Not nearly as interesting as the work he's done in his eight years at NFL Films, though. Eager came to the National Football League subsidiary as a systems analyst, and quickly took on greater responsibilities as NFL Films began relying more on PCs and networking. Today, Eager manages six of the 16 people, including three contract workers, now comprising the IT department.

Eager says designing the new corporate network has been his biggest challenge. Whether you're editing a film or developing the corporate network, NFL Films management inspires people to be creative and take chances.

The philosophy is, "If you're going to fail, fail spectacularly," Eager says, quoting Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films.

Bearing that in mind, Eager shunned traditional network approaches that kept data and voice distinct, and built a Cisco-based converged 1G bit/sec Ethernet backbone to carry voice, data and video applications over an IP infrastructure. 1G bit/sec links reach out to the company's 25 Windows NT and 2000 servers and 100M-bit/sec connections to 325 user desktops. A VPN secures remote access.

"A lot of places wouldn't let you put voice, data and video over the same line. No one questioned that here," Eager says.