Technology behind the Olympics
I do a lot of business with a company HQ'ed in France. Atos-Origin has a significant presence here in the states but are not that well known.
One of their significant claims to fame is being the system integrator for the olympic games for that last several years. They actually have been involved in this since 1992 but since Salt Lake City, they have the overall integration contract.
For the Vancouver Olympics, the VANOC (Vancouver Organizing Committee) started on the project of delivering this event 5 years ago. Atos came on board immediately and began building a technology team made up from several companies. They are responsible for all the networking, voice, data, video, scoring data, etc for the 16 days. They deliver all the video to the networks, all the wireless communications, a number of web sites and hundreds of miles of fiber, LAN and interconnects. It takes 3 years to put it all together and then use the "worlds" as their test. This is a test that CANNOT fail. The difference is that it is a single event while the Olympics can be up to 17 simultaneous events.
LOTS of redundancy, huge monitoring systems and a 24 hr staff of experts, journeymen in networking, server management, web development, etc, etc, etc. These systems CANNOT fail.
After it's all over, they also do the Para-olympics and then the massive job of tearing down some of the systems.
Heard from the VANOC CIO, the Atos business lead and Atos technology leader. They all stressed that the largest amount of work was getting the team to work well together. The technology is all well tested. No vendor is able to dictate the use of some new great product without massive testing. Typically doesn't get in for several years. They are constantly developing best practices and bring them forward to the next Olympics. As soon as this is over, the Atos team heads to London to start the next phase of summer Olympics.
Real impressive set of technology and even more impressive team.
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