Acer's Olympic dream

Following a cloak-and-dagger bus tour of the Olympic Park with no stopping allowed, Sara Yirrell gets a sneaky peak at the mammoth challenge facing the vendor this summer

Preparations for the London 2012 Olympic Games seem to have been going on forever. In fact, many would be hard pressed to remember a time when there wasn’t some scandal breaking over ticketing, the spiralling costs of construction or the Games’ legacy.

But despite all the well-publicised hitches and setbacks with the construction, there has been a group of companies quietly getting on with their jobs and setting up the heartbeat of the Olympics - the back-end IT system. Without this, there would be no scores, no timings and no way of collating race information quickly and beaming it out to billions of viewers around the globe.

Unfortunately, the only way those in the outside world will know of their existence is if anything goes wrong technically - something they are working around the clock to avoid.

Acer is one of these companies working together with the Games organiser, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG). Other technical partners include Atos Origin, Airware, BT, Cisco, Omega, Panasonic, Samsung and Visa.

LOCOGing on

Acer was selected as the Worldwide Partner of the Olympic Movement in the computing equipment category and has committed 300 staff to help LOCOG ensure the Games run perfectly over the summer.

Michael Trainor, Acer service project manager for the 2012 Olympic Games, said: “LOCOG will run all its key applications on Acer servers. These range from the normal back-office systems such as HR, finance and CRM, to the more specific and Games-critical workforce, accreditation and scheduling applications.

“LOCOG is happy to work with Acer as we have a proven, well-developed logistic infrastructure with high levels of reliability and competency.”

In total, 11,500 desktops, 1,100 notebooks and 900 servers will power the Games this summer in 107 technology-supported venues.

One little-publicised fact is that the technology running the Games will be three years old - it has to have been proven to work and was specced in 2009, rather than using all the shiny and untested technology available in 2012.

Acer’s job is far from easy. Despite handling all the PC infrastructure for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games and demonstrating its pedigree in the field, the London Games are three times bigger. In addition, the vendor is supplying all the computer equipment across the country to other Olympic venues, which increases the complexity of support requirements.

In total the vendor will be supporting the IT requirements of 10,500 athletes, 30,000 journalists and 4.3 billion TV viewers. There are 204 nations competing in the Olympics in 26 sports and 300 events. A further 100,000 volunteers will be on site to help out.

Green credentials are also an issue for the modern-day Olympics. With this in mind, Acer’s products have been designed to meet the strictest standards for energy conservation, low toxicity, ease of recycling and green labelling, and its desktops were designed to minimise power consumption by up to 30 per cent and reduce logistics costs because of their smaller size.

Trainor added: “The CPU has increased dramatically since the earliest examples and has added more power and speed. This evolution immediately embraced the server world and increased efficiency. For instance, where in the past we may have used 10 servers for a specific task, we are now down to just five or six units.

“The overall infrastructure now requires much less power and this translates into significant cost savings for both raw materials in manufacturing and transportation.”

Notably absent are any of Acer’s channel partners when it comes to supplying Games IT infrastructure.

Trainor said this was because Acer was “acting as a channel partner itself” by coming in the middle between the customer and the end user.

What a set-up

So how does it all work? At the LOCOG headquarters in London’s Docklands, Acer has set up a vast integration lab (pictured, p15) featuring banks of PCs, servers and printers. The room is immense and has to be seen to be believed.

Each bank of computers controls a particular sporting event and will monitor the scores and timings for all athletes involved.

There is also a closely guarded Technical Operations Centre (TOC) on site that went live in October 2011. This vast team of technology specialists will be the ones who have to handle any crises, smooth over any glitches and carry out constant troubleshooting on the systems in case anything goes wrong. The TOC sits behind a double-thickness glass wall, with visitors unable to enter or take pictures, adding to the air of mystery.

But despite the immense pressure, Acer remains calm about its challenge. Walter Deppeler, EMEA president and chief marketing officer at Acer, said: “Making an important contribution to the smooth and efficient running of the London 2012 Olympic Games is a very exciting task for Acer as we continue to serve more and more business customers.

“We want to prove that as our equipment and engineers can support the biggest sporting event in the world and satisfy the diverse needs of our Olympic customers, there is no doubt that we can also support businesses of any size.”

And as the press hysteria heightens around the start of the Games in July, one thing is guaranteed - those hardworking Acer technicians at the TOC and ITL will be calmly getting on with the job of making sure it all works.

Number-crunching - facts about the London games

8.8 million – Number of tickets that will be available

2,000 – number of newts relocated from the Olympic Park to the Waterworks nature reserve

200km – Total length of cabling for the underground powerlines – the distance from London to Nottingham

8.35KM – total length of waterways within or close to the Olympic Park

800,000 – number of people expected to use public transport to travel to the Games on the busiest day – more than the population of Leeds

53metres – height of the Olympic Stadium – three metres taller than Nelson’s column

205 Nations could compete at the Games

4,000 Trees will be planted on the Olympic Park and Olympic Village sites

97 per cent – Proportion of material reclaimed from demolition within the Olympic Park

10 – Different rail routes will serve Stratford station during and after the Games – making it the most connected station in London other than King’s Cross/St Pancras.