Innovation - Towards Delivering Excellence
Our IT partnership with the Olympic Games is a remarkable showcase for both our innovative developments and our proven capabilities. At each Olympic Games we successfully integrate, manage and secure the vast IT system that relays results, events and athlete information to spectators and media around the world.
Innovation in relation to the Olympic Games has a different dimension. The reliability required for the Olympic Games is so high as it has to be mature, proven, tested technology. We have a long-term vision for the IOC partnership and are already initiating and planning technology developments for Sochi 2014 and Rio de Janeiro 2016. And London 2012 will benefit from these planned innovations in the same way Beijing benefited from developments planned for Vancouver 2010 and London 2012.
Bringing Innovation to the Olympic Games
At each Games, there is a growing demand for richer content delivered more frequently and more conveniently to users. For the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, we transmitted unprecedented amounts of data and this will only increase for future Games. For example:
- We securely processed 60% more competition data – totalling 1.5 million messages.
- We enabled almost 50 percent more stories to be published each day in English by the Olympic News Service – totalling an average of 500 stories a day. Around half of these have been translated into French or Chinese.
New for Vancouver
- For the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver and the 2012 London Games, we are expecting to increase access to the Commentator Information Systems (CIS) from outside the host city, significantly reduced travel and CO2 emissions, as well as costs.
- Atos Origin has developed and operates the first online volunteer platform for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver. This processes more than 50,000 applications from people in 100 countries, thus reducing travel to physical centers, paper consumption and the associated GHG emissions.
- In another first, the online Accreditation System is one of Atos Origin’s many initiatives to deploy technological solutions that help the Vancouver organizing committee deliver more sustainable Games and significantly reduce the amount of paper used during the Games. Previously, applications for accreditation were printed and sent from around the world.
New for London
- London 2012 will leverage a number of technology innovations to improve access to information and with the objective to deliver the most sustainable Olympic Games yet. For the first time, we will implement a new solution, designed together with the IOC, – the Olympic Data Feed - to consolidate all data feeds to the newswires, websites and London 2012 intranet into a single solution to provide a more sustainable and efficient service.
- In the area of sustainability, we are working with the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) to evaluate the use of new technologies, such as virtualisation, so that the London 2012 Games use less energy and hardware than in Beijing.