Virtual “meeting rooms” will be set up during next year’s London Olympics for 6,000 volunteers and staff.
London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Locog) staff will be given 1,800 BT MeetMe WebEx licences in the lead-up to the event, increasing to 6,000 by the time that the Games begin.
Volunteers and staff will use the software to make plans before the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
“As we reach the business end of the project, we need to ensure our teams are able to work flexibly and efficiently," said Gerry Pennell, CIO of Locog.
"Having a tool like MeetMe WebEx will prove to be an invaluable asset for our staff. It is also rewarding to see two of our sponsors collaborating to provide services like this to help us on the road to London 2012.”
Technology will play a key role in planning for the Olympics, particularly when it comes to routes to the Games.
More than 5,000 telecoms jobs, generating more than £250m for the UK IT sector, is expected to be created in Britain by the sporting event. Roles being advertised include GIS jobs involving cartographic output.
The Technology Operations Centre (TOC) for the Olympics contains 180 servers that will be maintained by 450 professionals over the 16 days during the Olympics games and the 12 days during the Paralympics.
All of the 94 Olympic locations will have an in-house technology team, overseen by the TOC.
The same software used by Atos in past Olympics will be used at next year’s Games although it will be more sophisticated, said Pennell.
An added Commentator Information System (CIS) will give commentators and reporters their own touch-screen results system, he said.
The TOC team is currently holding “technology rehearsals” to ensure that there are no glitches during the event. They are going through drills of different problem scenarios that may crop up at the Games, including cyber security attacks.
Pennell warned that because of the huge demand for information on events, he couldn’t guarantee that there would be no issues with connectivity, although he did say that he expected most of the event to go smoothly.
"We know things are performing as expected but that doesn't mean we are done. There's still a lot of testing that needs to be done in the next 10 months," he said.
"(But) for the vast majority of people, I think the experience will be pretty good.”
The Olympics are one of the key events in the industry helping to make IT careers more recession proof than most other sectors.
