BTEX 2025: How MLSE Transformed IT to Elevate Fan Experience with CDW

MLSE is a major player in Canada’s sports and entertainment industry, owning franchises such as the Toronto Maple Leafs, Toronto Raptors and more, along with major venues like Scotiabank Arena.

Adamkowski has been with MLSE for nearly two decades, leading a diverse IT operations team. His scope includes system and network administration, cloud infrastructure, site reliability engineering, platform engineering and data operations.

“My team’s role at MLSE is to provide a technological base that unlocks the potential for the rest of the company and provides a launchpad for innovation,” Adamkowski shared.

For MLSE, fan engagement is more than a KPI – it’s one of the core priorities. As an organization that thrives on delivering the thrill of sporting events to its audiences, MLSE deeply focuses on digital experiences that elevate the fan experience.

“The key pillars of our organization revolve around fan engagement,” Adamkowski emphasized, noting how this commitment shapes everything from in-venue technology to mobile engagement platforms.

Explaining the role of MLSE’s IT advancement in the fan experience, he mentioned the example of Scotiabank Arena, “We’ve put a lot of technology into concourse spaces – just walk out, self-service, in-seat ordering.

“The idea is to shorten the time fans spend away from the action and bring the experience to them.”

Beyond the venue, their innovative platforms like MLSE Fan Access help fans stay connected digitally even when they’re not attending an event.

For MLSE, the role of IT has changed significantly in just a few years, with innovation, digital experiences and infrastructure modernization becoming key factors. Over the years, the company’s mindset has shifted from keeping the lights on to driving innovation.

“In 2019, just before the Raptors championship run, we were in the cloud for about three years, at that point,” Adamkowski said.

“But we were very data centre-centric with a lot of off-the-shelf software. And the world was really different at that point in time. Our focus was keeping the lights on and making sure the infrastructure works.”

He added, “When we were in the cloud, we thought, we've got a cloud-first strategy. But we really didn't. We had a SaaS-first strategy maybe.”

The real pivot came when a new Chief Technology and Digital Officer rebranded the IT group as Digital Labs, setting a new expectation for IT to become an incubator for innovation. This led to a series of changes for the company to revamp digital experiences and drive value through innovation.

“The purpose was clear that we needed to start to show the company some value from technology other than just running line of business applications and keeping the lights on,” Adamkowski shared.

“We thought there was some opportunity to be had by building our own experiences and applications, whether that's line of business or fan facing. And we really didn't have any of that mindset before.”

Rather than chasing perfection, Adamkowski introduced an intentional 80 percent strategy to their cloud transition.

“We decided to build 80 percent of what we know we need on a regular basis and leave the last 20 percent to be filled in as our developers require specific features,” he pointed out.

This guardrail-based approach enabled faster delivery, smoother team adoption and minimized the cognitive load on engineering and operations alike. “It gave us an achievable goal and it meant that everybody was more engaged because we could actually get to that finish line,” he remarked.

Reflecting on broader trends, Burke noted, “What we're seeing across the Canadian landscape is that the cloud-first strategy has really sort of evolved into a cloud-smart strategy.”

Adamkowski echoed the sentiment by illustrating how MLSE transitioned from a lift-and-shift mindset to a more intentional, platform-centric approach.

“So, when you're making a sea change like that, not everybody is going to be on board. And you must figure out how do you engage your stakeholders within the organization that need to work on these technologies and make sure they're a part of the process.

“Again, it goes back to that 80 percent line – understanding what the requirements were made us really confident that what we were going to develop and implement from an infrastructure standpoint was going to meet their needs.”

CDW Canada continues to play a significant role in MLSE’s ongoing transformation from traditional IT operations to a high-speed, innovation-driven organization.

As Adamkowski explained, their early cloud journey was self-taught and filled with uncertainty – “you don’t know what you don’t know.”

He likened working with a partner as “Tandem skydiving – you know where you want to go, but sometimes you just want someone to hold your hand as you jump for the first time.”

Currently, CDW is partnering with MLSE on a key initiative to make their cloud infrastructure fully self-service. This includes integrating an AWS Service Catalog with ServiceNow, allowing development teams to instantly spin up opinionated environments, like serverless frameworks or Kubernetes namespaces, without needing hands-on setup by platform engineers.

“We’re trying to get the humans out of the loop,” Adamkowski said, “so we can focus on the 20 percent of problems where the real value lies.”

This project reflects CDW’s evolving role from an infrastructure enabler to a strategic co-creator of scalable, developer-ready innovation platforms.

Adamkowski reflected on working with CDW, “From an experiential standpoint, we’ve gotten everything we expect,” and now looks forward to engaging with CDW on new technologies as they emerge. 

In the past few years, CDW Canada has kept pace with the constantly evolving Canadian technology landscape. Adamkowski showed keen interest in how CDW’s evolving solutions portfolio can help MLSE modernize in the future and replicate the same results for upcoming projects.

He also mentioned how CDW continues to add value for MLSE, “Making sure that when CDW brings new opportunities and ideas to us, they're incorporating what they know about our business and how we like to operate – that's valuable to everyone because the world is changing so quickly.

“They've got our trust and our business; there are certain opportunities that they know better than I do.”