Come August and the Chinese dragon is all set to bedazzle the world with its prowess and ingenuity. Beijing Olympics 2008 will mark the arrival of China on a global scale, giving it the recognition of a prosperous and powerful nation. Little wonder then that the powers that be at Beijing are leaving no stones unturned in their endeavor, be it taking the Olympic torch to the summit of the Chomulungma (known to the world as Mt Everest) or investing in latest sports technologies. In fact, this years Games promises to be the most tech-savvy and also the most tech-heavy event in all of history.

To ensure all runs smoothly, Lenovo (a home-grown hardware major) has been enlisted as an official computing equipment provider. Lenovo is providing 20,000 pieces of equipment, including 12,000 desktops, 6,000 notebooks, and myriad servers and printers. Besides this the company will also be handling all IT-related issues. Since the events are spread across Beijing and six other cities, with 100,000 volunteers, 20,000 athletes, and 10,000 games officials, it will be a Herculean task to manage the nitty-gritty. Lenovos infrastructure will manage the entire games management system involving timing and scoring, on-venue results, administration and logistics, and information security.

There will be 500 on-site engineers deployed to take care of any problems or hiccups that may come up. The technology team includes experts who managed Lenovos successful support of the Torino 2006 Olympic Winter Games, and additional technicians from around the company, including 40 team members volunteering to join the team, says David Shaw, director, Brand Marketing and Marketing Communications, Lenovo Asia-Pacific. According to him, the team of integrators and engineers has been toiling for over two years now, testing and integrating to ensure all will be ready for August 8, 2008.

While thousands of athletes from hundreds of nations will be competing for honors on the ground, there will be millions on the World Wide Web who will be able to live the Olympic moment, albeit electronically. Lenovo has launched a website, http://2008.lenovo.com, as part of an ongoing partnership with Google. This site acts as an aggregator for Olympic Games and torch relay news, and Lenovos key activities around both, as well as Lenovo champions updates. When fully executed, the portal will be available in thirteen languages. The portal also features an athlete blogger program where athletes can share their Olympic experience with their fans.

Leave aside the logistics and management, technology has played a crucial role in the torch design as well. The Beijing Olympic torch, cauldron, lantern, and torch-stand have also been designed on Lenovo workstations. Lenovos award-winning design team spent more than ten months on the design of the Beijing 2008 Olympic torch, known as the Cloud of Promisea design that won over 300 competitive entries. The 34-member design team specialists were involved in this multinational project, and effectively collaborated on teleconferencing and videoconferencing to design the torch.

Lenovos partnership with Beijing Olympics is not really exclusive; there are a host of other companies that are working on the same project, for instance, Atos Origin.

For the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, Atos Origin, under BOCOG Technology Departments supervision, leads and manages a consortium of nine technology suppliers and partners. Most technology partners and event management companies dismantle their teams after every event. On the other hand, we at Atos Origin carry forward the expertise gained by our professionals to every new project. For example, once the Beijing Olympics 2008 is over our team will immediately move toward preparing for the 2010 and 2012 Olympics. Having a dedicated technology team specifically for the Olympics has made it easy for us to work, says Milind Kamat, managing director, Atos Origin, India.

Ramalinga Raju, founder and chairman, Satyam and Joseph S Blatter, president, FIFA

Bending it Like Satyam
While Lenovo might be driving the Olympics in Beijing, the desi Satyam Computers have also jumped into the fray in a big way. Hyderabad-based Satyam Computers is the first Indian company to sign up as sponsor and official IT services provider for the next two editions of the FIFA World Cup in 2010 and 2014. The company was initially handling a small extranet project, a Web-based access to the portal for FIFA World Cup but will now officially be an IT service provider for the two World Cups to be held in South Africa and Brazil, respectively. Satyam has been entrusted with the task to develop the core IT event management system, accommodation and hospitality management, as well as local organizing committees during the next seven years.

FIFA did not have many reuse features in their software solutions. Satyam, through this partnership, has designed a standard and configurable platform for FIFA to integrate its dynamic processes. We have brought in a reusability factor to the solutions that FIFA will now use. This has considerably reduced the cost of ownership for FIFA as they are able to extend the solutions to other smaller local events, says Dilbagh Gill, head, Sports Vertical, Satyam Computers. Satyam has developed an event management system with twenty software modules focusing on specific areas such as accreditations, transportation system, volunteer management system, space and asset management, ticketing, accommodation, hospitality, etc.

As over 150,000 volunteers sign up for the World Cup, Satyam has customized the software modules in local languages so as to get a large subset of the volunteers to use the system effectively. Satyam is also providing extensive training and large scale IT infrastructure support for FIFA. It is working with other technology providers such as Sony, which is the official hardware provider, the African telecom company MTN, and SA Telecom to provide the data center set-up for FIFA. The entire hardware and telecom infrastructure will eventually be configured and managed by Satyam. It will also monitor application development, maintenance of IT infrastructure, provisioning, and availability of resources at the venue. Satyam also has help desk services with its employees working on-site as well as remotely. The company will also deploy its BPO arm to run an official call center for FIFAa first of its kind for an event of such scale.

With a presence in more than 57 countries, Satyam plans to fully leverage its global expertise and enter other sports verticals such as motor-sports, golf, and basketball, and also set up sports training academies. Satyam with the help of FIFA will bring in programs to identify talent in India after Euro 2008 to create awareness about football as a career and develop talent. Satyam is bullish on the growing business opportunities in sports and is expecting $100 mn revenues through this vertical by 2010.

Tennis in Second Life
Even lawn tennis, a game that evolved in the 19th century is not untouched by the wonders of technology. IBM has been actively involved with the sport and is the official technology provider for Wimbledon, Roland Garros, and the US Open. IBMs solutions range from hosting the official website, AustralianOpen.com, and supporting of the scoring and statistical systems, and the match update center, to delivery of innovations such as match analysis DVDs and customized Web applications such as myAustralianOpen and Slamtracker. For fans craving up-to-date and instant information, IBM offers users a customized experience through myAustralianOpen, where they can select up to five of their favorite players and receive real-time scores, news, schedules, and other content related to their choice of players. In 2008, over 7 mn unique users visited AustralianOpen.com for a total 30.8 mn times.

To accommodate fluctuating demands from tennis fans, IBM has linked the official website www.AustralianOpen.com to a powerful, global grid computing system by connecting hundreds of servers together to form a grid network that behaves like a giant supercomputer.

Tennis Australia needs an infrastructure that can scale to meet peak demand, but is also flexible enough to deal with unpredictable spikes in demand. The infrastructure must also be available at all times, and thoroughly secure and affordable. In an environment of rising energy costs and aging data centers, IBM has been able to consolidate its server environment for Tennis Australia from 60 servers to 9, virtualizing workloads onto p550 express servers. Weve been able to reduce our energy consumption by 23% and cooling demand by 25%. Weve also been able to reduce our cost-per-visit by 33%, since 2004, while visit traffic has increased by over 40%, says Sarah Cole, sponsorship manager, IBM Asia Pacific.

Evolution of the Hawk-Eye Hawk-Eye was invented by Dr Paul Hawkins, a former Buckinghamshire player, and is presently owned by a company named Hawk-Eye Innovations. The technology was first used by Channel 4 during a test match between England and Pakistan on Lords Cricket Ground, on May 21, 2001

Hawk-Eyes cricket systems were used by host broadcasters at the 2006 ICC Champions Trophy, the 2007 World Cup, and have been present at major Test and ODI series around the world since 2001. Hawk-Eye has been implemented in all the major test status nations such as the UK, Australia, India, South Africa, West Indies, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. At the current IPL league too, Hawk-Eye is being used extensively to provide ball-to-ball statistics, says James Jaheti, system operator, Hawk-Eye Innovations. However, according to Jaheti, the system is not used by the umpires to adjudicate on LBW decisions in test cricket or one day international cricket. It is used primarily by the majority of television networks to track the trajectory of balls in flight. Its major use in cricket is in analysing lbw decisions, where the likely path of the ball can be projected forward, through the batsmans legs, to see if it would have hit the wicket. Currently, this information is only visible to television viewers, although it may be adopted in the future by the third umpire. The technolgy is now being used in tennis as well, as the sport is also edging toward more mechanised umpire calls. The technology was first used by TV broadcasters as a virtual instant replay to double-check the line refs, but has recently been adopted by several major tournaments. Hawk-Eye has been used in television coverage of several major tennis tournaments. In 2005, Hawk-Eye was tested by the International Tennis Federation (ITF) in New York City and was passed for professional use. In 2006, the US Open became the first grand-slam event to use the system during play, allowing players to challenge line calls. Besides cricket and tennis, Hawk-Eye has also found its way into other games such as snooker and football.

Not only this, thanks to latest technology innovations, such as Hawk-Eye, Point Tracker, and Speed Serve, the game of tennis has even debuted on Second Life, a 3D virtual world. It was in 2007 that IBM introduced a Second Life component to the Australian Open. Teams from the US, UK, and Australia and worked on a collaborative, round-the-clock project to build the virtual replica of Melbournes Rod Laver Arena. IBM provided real-time data for scores, statistics, serve speed, ball trajectory data for Rod Laver Arena in Second Life.

This year, IBM held a couture on the court competition in Second Life, asking fans to design the best tennis outfit for their avatars. Also, IBM introduced Australian Open radio streaming, where Tennis Australias tournament radio channel was broadcast and heard all over the island, live during the tournament. Fans were able to listen to live radio streamed on the website or watch video highlights of the days action, as well as following the scores from all courtslive.

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