As the Beijing Games kick off tomorrow, the 4,000-strong IT team will be working to communicate competition results to the rest of the world within 0.3 seconds.

Atos Origin, worldwide IT partner of the Olympic Games, has announced that the team is now fully operational, following four years of design, building and testing in Beijing.

All systems across the 75 Olympic venues will be monitored 24/7 from the Technology Operations Centre.

Results will be communicated to participants, spectators, the global media, 21,600 visiting journalists and four billion TV viewers through the information diffusion system, one of the two main systems at the heart of the infrastructure.

Atos Origin has introduced an intelligent processing system, as the security teams expect 9.9 million filtered events for every day of the Olympics ­ 10 times the number logged at the Torino Olympic Winter Games in 2006.

The system focuses on security architecture, risk management and security operations, enabling effective response to any potential threat from outside the network or within.

The systems are already starting to run at operational capacity, said Patrick Adiba, executive vice president for the Olympics at Atos Origin:

"We are now on the final countdown. We are fully operational and in fact
the games management systems, which among other things handle
accreditation and staffing schedules, are already working at peak usage.

"For the Olympic Games, we are faced with an absolute unmovable deadline
that gives us only one chance to get it right."

The first members of our team arrived in November 2004 and since then we have been working with the Beijing Organising Committee, the International Organising Committee and our technology partners to design, build, test and test again the IT
infrastructure that will relay the relay the results in a timely, accurate, and secure way to the billions of viewers around the world."