When the world turns its collective attention to Athens, Greece, and the start of the 28th Olympiad Aug. 13, it will be able to do so thanks to the herculean IT effort of the Athens Olympic Committee and its sponsors.
One pillar of that effort is, and has been for the past 40 years, Xerox Corp., in Stamford. As with past Olympics, Xerox has spent the last several years preparing. But rather than orchestrate large-system deployments as it has before, this time Xerox has been designing and implementing a massive data-capturing and imaging-systems network, as well as an IT nerve center from which to monitor, configure and manage the infrastructure.
For Vince Schaffer, Xerox’s director of worldwide Olympic operations for the past decade, the Olympic commitment is an exercise in global enterprise planning and deployment, involving everything from assessment and early planning to procurement and deployment—and a lot more in between.
For Xerox, as well as the other technology sponsors, however, the enterprise is transient. “Yeah, we build this Fortune 500 company and then close it down six months after the games,” Schaffer said with a laugh in an interview recently from his office in Athens.
News source: eWeek
