Cisco: Glasgow Games shows network is now centre stage

Cisco UK boss Phil Smith says partners should take Commonwealth Games as endorsement of how important networking has become

It's easy to dismiss networking as the IT market's wan child - the one who blends into the background as its brothers and sisters wow the guests with spectacular card tricks and piano recitals.

But although the world of routing and switching may never be flashy, the IT network is arguably becoming increasingly central to every walk of life, a suggestion bolstered by the recent Glasgow Commonwealth Games.

Billed as the "most connected Games ever", Glasgow 2014 saw official network infrastructure partner Cisco roll out 240km of fibre. The networking giant also installed 441 switches, 40 routers and 378 wireless access points across 40 venues to support the athletes, officials, volunteers and spectators.

Talking to CRN, Cisco UK managing director Phil Smith said Cisco partners should take the Games as an endorsement that networking is now "front and centre when it comes to the delivery of significant events".

"Maybe we wouldn't have thought of a sports event as the big obvious thing for networking - but it is now," he declared.

"Networking is pervading our lives. It is that old Cisco thing of changing the way you work, live, learn and play: well it is and I think for our partners to have such a demonstration of a network being a vital part of making a big Games successful is great."

Cisco technology underpinned everything from the scoring to ensuring organising groups were able to talk to each other over telepresence in the months and years running up to the event. Other technology partners for the Games included Atos Origin, which supported 50,911 applications on the Volunteer Portal; Dell, which supplied 2,400 PCs and laptops and 50 servers; and Toshiba, which provided 650 printers and MFDs. Scottish Cisco partner NVT Group also acted as technology services integrator.

Smith (pictured) admitted the wireless network, which was based on Cisco's Identity Services Engine (ISE), was put under strain by the social media demands of the Games' 4,084 participants.

"As soon as the young people hit the athletes' village, the first thing they do is get their phones out and start videoing it or taking selfies and uploading it to the network," he explained. "They melt the wireless network in the first couple of days and normally we have to ramp it up to get them more performance."

Cisco also supplied the Games with 2,500 IP phones, six intrusion prevention systems and eight firewalls.

Murray Husband, general manager of IT services at Glasgow 2014 Limited, which organised the Games, revealed his team had shied away from using cloud computing as it "wasn't quite there from a trust perspective" when the design decisions were taken four years ago.

"What we do from a technology perspective tends to be quite risk-averse as it has to work right first time," he said as he gave a tour of the Technology Operations Centre at which staff from Cisco and the Games' other technology suppliers are stationed.

At a press lunch, Cisco wheeled ut Lord Sebastian Coe to talk about how the expectations of being connected have grown among the organisers and athletes down the years.

"The ticketing operation in Sydney was entirely paper and there was no broadband," he said. "There were no smartphones in Athens and Facebook was sort of there but not. In Beijing, there were 30,000 tweets a day and within a year it was up to 33 million. The explosion in technology between Sydney and London is an example of the rapidity of that change."

Coe claimed he was "first athlete in the modern era to utilise the application of science" when it was regarded as "voodoo science".

Despite its relatively modest scale, the Glasgow Games in some way presented Cisco with more challenges than its involvement in the London 2012 Olympic Games.

"We couldn't get into some of the venues here until pretty much the day before," he said. "There were many existing venues in the Olympic Games but here all the venues bar one or two of the smaller ones existed and you had places like Hampden Park (pictured) with stuff going on a couple of days beforehand who would say ‘right, you can have it now' and basically you had to get all the infrastructure in and get it tested. It's been pretty challenging, more so than the Olympics, so we've learned a lot from that."

Smith added: "Each time, we genuinely have to look at whether [big sporting events] are worth it from a business perspective, but each time we do it we think ‘what an experience'. It's energised our own people and every one of our customers who's been here has had the experience of their lifetime."