Lenovo has announced that it has completed the second of three massive hardware deliveries for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games with the shipment of nearly 700 pieces of hardware, including notebooks, desktops, desktop monitors and servers, to the Integration Test Center of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG). More than 30 Lenovo staffers are now working at the 800-square-meter Integration Lab in downtown Beijing with various partners, configuring the equipment for use in the upcoming test events that begin in July 2007 and end only weeks before the Games begin on August 8, 2008.
Lenovo is the exclusive computing equipment supplier for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Virtually every aspect of the management of the Games, from gathering and storing participant data to displaying the scores to organizing all BOCOG activities, depends on the hardware provided by Lenovo.
As of March 27, the start of the 500-day countdown to the Games, Lenovo will have provided BOCOG with approximately 300 servers, 800 desktop computers, 800 computer monitors and 70 notebook computers. By the time the Games commence Lenovo will have delivered more than 14,000 pieces of computing equipment to support 56 venues in seven cities, including 39 competition venues and 17 data centers and BOCOG centers.
“With the completion of the latest hardware delivery, Lenovo is now running tests at the Integration Lab and preparing for the long, arduous test phase, which at nearly a year in length far exceeds the test period allocated to your average project, sports or otherwise,” said Lenovo's Olympic Technology & Sponsorship Director, Leon Xie. “The purpose of the 42 test events is not to find out how good we are but to look for problems. We will use our equipment in the test events to see what's going right and wrong, and to see how our supporting team coordinates and cooperates with other sponsors' support teams – how is the flow, what are the issues? Then we will take the equipment back and modify it and determine how long it takes for the problem to be solved.”
The testing phase is vital because implementation of the complex Games' technology system will occur literally overnight. A large number of applications will be running on Lenovo equipment, including Game Management Systems; staffing and scheduling; accreditation; transportation; sports entries and qualifications; timing and scoring; ticketing; Lenovo Internet Lounges in the athlete villages and more. Many of these systems will need to be duplicated in seven different cities, Beijing, Qingdao, Tianjin, Qinhuangdao, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Dalian, with systems in place to control all venues remotely.
The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games dwarf previous Games in terms of scale. At this same point before the Torino 2006 Olympic Winter Games, Lenovo only needed to commit about one-third the number of products and technicians. By August 2008, the number of on-site Lenovo technicians and support personnel will mushroom to above 400.
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