Security concerns and the risk of downtime during the Olympics have made organizers hesitant to change existing technology systems, but this may change for the upcoming Beijing sports event in three years.
Claude Philipps, Program Director at Atos Origin (France), which is affiliated with the International Olympic Committee, stated: “The implementation of open source is gradually being approved by the Beijing Organizing Committee (BOCOG) to reduce costs associated with licensing and registration.”
Security has also been a reason for the prohibition of wireless networks in many previous sports events. “There will be no wireless technology at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin (Italy) next year, but it will be available in the Chinese capital. At that time, open source and wireless systems will be more stable, and we will utilize Cisco’s control network,” said Massimo Dossetto, security expert for the Olympic event. “Additionally, we need to find ways to minimize investment costs for the large volume of supporting equipment for the event.”
The technology systems supporting the Olympics will be managed by over 1,200 members, including 800 volunteers, who will be responsible for overseeing servers running on Intel processing devices and Unix boxes, as well as 4,700 computers and 700 printers.
