Atos Origin - The Technology Behind the Athens 2004 Olympic Games

August 9, 2004

The Athens 2004 Olympic Games begin on August 13th, and 10,500 athletes, 21,500 media representatives and an estimated four billion viewers worldwide will be expecting to see immediate results and a smooth running of the event. The primary responsibility for this lies with Atos Origin, one of the top Olympic sponsors and a leading International Information Technology company.

After four years of design and planning with a consortium of over fifteen partners Atos Origin has built a vast IT infrastructure to rival that of most major corporations and cities. The two main systems that are integral to this are the Information Diffusion System (IDS), which relays results and athlete information to the Olympic Family, the media and TV viewers, and the Games Management System (GMS), which manages the logistics behind the Games. This is vital for ensuring that the athletes and media have access to the venues they need; accommodation for the duration of their stay and are able to get to events swiftly and on time.

The Transportation System, which is part of the GMS, provides programming, planning and scheduling of transport services for the Olympic family and allocates the available transportation resources. The Accreditation System, also part of GMS, controls the entire accreditation process - identifies the participants for various events, manages registration, assigns access privileges and grants security clearance.

At the heart of the Information Diffusion System (IDS), is INFO 2004, an intranet that is available to accredited media and the 200,000 members of the Olympic Family. It features 50,000 pages of information in three different languages - English, French and Greek - 11,000 biographies and historical results. There are over 4000 terminals across the Olympic Games venues from which the information can be accessed.

Also part of the IDS is the Commentator Information System (CIS), a browser-based application that displays results on touch-screen PCs at the press centres in just a fraction of a second, for instant dispatch across the globe.

Source: Atos Origin