IT's a marathon, not a sprint...

Putting the Games to the test – today marks the start of 200,000 hours of IT testing

This morning, 19th January, international journalists were eager to get a glimpse of the IT integration systems which will be running the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The IT systems for seven sports, including athletics, tennis, basketball, volleyball and triathlon, will begin the rigorous testing programme which will prepare them for the Olympic Games in the summer of 2012, and as Chief Integrator for London 2012 I shall be overseeing it all. The testing of this pack of systems will require over half a million lines of code and by the time the Games arrive, Atos Origin will be managing the deployment of 900 servers, 1,000 networks and security devices, 9,500 computers.

From my experience of the Olympics in Salt Lake City, Athens and Beijing, this kind of thorough testing is vital to ensure the performance of the systems themselves. However, it also gives us an opportunity to showcase the extent and breadth of IT infrastructure, which an event like the Olympics requires.

This week, for instance, we have begun testing the Commentator Information System, or CIS. This is the system that provides the commentators for any given event with the information they will transmit to the viewer. Athletes’ names, personal bests, running numbers, age, weight, height and innumerable other features will be displayed on a monitor in the commentary booth, fed in by an IT system which is just one of the many that enable the Games to run. .

As with all the systems being tested, the CIS will help make London 2012 a success both logistically and as a spectacle. All of which makes a long and thorough testing process even more of a priority.