The Beijing 2008 Summer Olympic Games could switch to an open-source technology platform under proposals to be considered by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
The move will be recommended by the IOC’s technology partner Atos Origin, under the guidance of subcontractors, including Hewlett-Packard and IBC, said Claude Philipps, program director at Atos Origin for the 2006 Turin Games. He said, “we have a plan to propose this for Beijing. It will save money on the licenses”.
The committee is to make a final decision after Atos presents the plan to the IOC in a formal proposal.
But Philipps said support costs could hinder the open-source switch. “The issue might be support, because, especially in China, you don’t have all the companies we have in Europe and the U.S.”.
The information technology behind the Olympics is massive, involving about 1,200 IT team members, including 800 volunteers, who run 450 Intel-based servers and Unix boxes, 4,700 PCs and 700 printers.
The inflexible deadlines and the need for Olympic Games security mean the technology choices are usually quite conservative. This led to wireless networks being banned for previous Games, but that could change for Beijing in 2008.
Massimo Dossetto, IT security architect for the Turin 2006 Games said “there is no wireless in Turin, but there will be in Beijing. The technology has become mature and we will use Cisco’s network admin control”.
Dossetto said that radio frequency identification technology is also being looked at to help keep track of PCs and other IT equipment during the Games but biometrics and smart cards are not on the agenda.
“We would need to deploy a huge number of devices to read them, and just for one event it is not cost-effective”, he said.
