The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games will be the largest sporting event in the world. More than 10,000 athletes will compete in 7 Cities (Beijing, Hong Kong, Qingdao, Tianjin, Shanghai, Shenyang, Qinhuangdao) and across more than 60 Competition and Non-Competition Venues.

The challenge is to flawlessly capture and bring this event to billions of television and Internet customers using innovative media applications.
 

Project Phases

The Road to Beijing actually began in 2003 with the development of a Master Plan. Key officials and technicians from China were then present during the Athens 2004 Olympic Games and the Design phase then began, including the defining of business requirements and the designing of the Systems and Test Infrastructure.

In 2005, we began the Build phase for the systems and test facilities and in mid 2006 the Test phase began in detail covering test events and technical rehearsals. In fact this continues right up until the moment the Games begin on 8th August, 2008!

What is an Olympic IT Project like?

Imagine a company with almost 200,000 employees:

• with 4 billion customers
• printing 25 million pages per week
• in an 24x7 environment

The company manages the essential feed to the press worldwide and not only that but some 21,600 journalists are also in town to capture the scoop!

• We roll out the entire IT infrastructure of the “company”
• We manage an integrated team of more than 4,000 IT experts from the world’s leading companies, including Atos Origin Olympics experts and the best Chinese IT professionals
• We help issue passport-grade badges to all 200,000 accredited “employees”
• Then manage the IT operations for 3 weeks

Then when the Olympic flame is switched off, everything has to be dismantled and removed.

This is what running an Olympics Project is like!