The world's attention will focus on Beijing over the next 12 months in the lead up to the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. The city is busily finishing the construction of the major event venues, like the Bird's Nest and Water Cube, where the opening ceremony and swimming events will be showcased. While the Chinese capital is developing trendy and high-tech building architecture, the IT infrastructure that will support the world's greatest sporting event is being based on more conservative and established systems.
Wireless networks, radio frequency identification (RFID) and biometric scans may not be dominant, but, according to the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) and its hardware supplier Lenovo, reliability has a far higher priority than cutting-edge technologies. As the world turns its attention towards next year's staging of more than 300 different events, all happening within 17 days, the IT systems that support the 2008 Olympics cannot afford any failure nor downtime, notes Hou Xinyi, deputy director, technology department of BOCOG.