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Businesses in London may not be prepared for the full impact the 2012 London Olympic Games will have on operations, especially when it comes to the provisioning of technology according to Cisco managing director for London 2012 Neil Crockett.

Cisco is a technology partner for the Olympic event to be held in East London in July and August next year.

Crockett said while Cisco, a provider of network infrastructure for the game, will be working with fellow partners BT (communications serviceprovider) and IT partner Atos to ensure some collaboration and communications services are provided through the Cloud for the first time at an Olympic event, few companies are putting similar provisions in place.

“We have a huge number of stakeholders coming [to the Olympic Games in London]. [The network] is over 100 locations, 34 of those competition venues, 20 critical venues,” Crockett told DatacenterDynamics at its CONVERGED event in London today.

“It is like running 26 world championships in one go with up to 70,000 volunteers, and 6,000 people organizing the event, 21,000 press and 21,00 athletes.”

Cisco is putting in 80,000 connections and 2,200 switches for the Olympic Games, and while it has created enterprise networks larger than this, Crockett said the challenge with this network is the required scalability and resilience for a network running so much HD content with high security requirements.

“The technical director from the IOC (International Olympic Committee) Jean-Francois Gautie says we can postpone the launch of  rocket but we never postpone the Olympics because of IT,” Crockett.

“There will be 10.8m visitors attending the game through the duration, so network needs to be able to support them as well.”

Hosted and cloud-based applications will be used for the first time at the Olympic games, according to Cisco Technical Sales Director Ian Foddering, delivering services for BT HUCS, its telephony services and BT MeetMe, BT’s web collaboration service.

“It is the first time full HD broadcasting will be consumed across our (the Olympic) own network as well as end to end voice data. That brings in some interesting things such as the policies for servers, capability to manage those and hosted and cloud applications,” Foddering said.

“For Cisco it is more about how you use things like multicast in the network to make sure high bandwidth grabbing video is streamed across the network to the point where it has to split, how you use technology to do this and it redundant in a very easy way.”

One thing companies operating in London during the Olympics have not thought about, however, is how similar technologies can be used to accommodate changes in the workplace as a result of the Olympic Games, according to Foddering and Crockett.

“Transport for London (TfL) is saying there will be 100 extraordinary days of transport, for example,” Crockett said. “August 4 is to be the peak day with an estimated 700,000 extra people coming into London.

“There will be a huge amount of people moving around, so TfL is encouraging businesses to get people to work remotely.

“BT did a survey after the Vancouver games, and found that 30% of businesses said they wished in retrospect they had invested in more collaboration tools and 33% of companies ran out of network capacity.”

Crockett said before the network is in operation at the Olympic Games, more than 20,000 hours of testing led by ATOS and BT will be carried out the network infrastructure, for the first time at an Olympics carrying voice, video and data.

Cisco has set up a linked in page with BT to help address solutions for the Olympic Games featuring webinars and more at Businessready2012.

You can stay up to date with more news from DatacenterDynamics CONVERGED at #DCDLondon