Imagine your customer reference marketing could make use of just two words? Sounds lame, doesn’t it.

But if those words happened to be ‘Olympic’ and ‘Games’…

Whatever your views on the corporate commercialization of the modern Games, especially those of the 21st Century, it’s difficult not to be impressed by their global broadband telecommunications reach. Whether it’s via TV or the Internet, billions are able to follow the action on many kinds of devices.

For example, the winter Olympics just finished in Sochi, Russia and I became interested in their behind-the-scenes IT efforts.
Googling turned up Atos, a ‘Worldwide IT Partner’ - and how about that microsite page as a customer reference! Not only are the Olympic rings displayed in the header alongside the Atos name logo, but Atos’s tag line’s also there too - “Your business technologists. Powering progress.”

This CNET media article provided some breathtaking background about the IT infrastructure challenges faced by Atos and led me to seek out their corporate site, and the Games-related microsite page mentioned above. Of course, no single case study, or even a series of them, is going to do justice to the mammoth scale of what Atos are tasked with by the Olympic movement. And anyway, there are probably numerous security and confidentiality issues in the type of information that could be released into the public domain.

That being said, the Atos microsite does a fine job of connecting their challenges and achievements at the Olympics with what they can do for the corporate prospects checking them out. In the words of Jacques Rogge, former President of the IOC, “The unsung hero of the Olympic Games is Atos, because without Atos none of this would be possible.” (Although he was referring specifically to London 2012, that message has been reinforced by each subsequent Games they have been involved in.)

Author: Mark McClure - A freelance b2b case study and white paper writer to the computer networking industry. Based in Tokyo, Japan. Mark McClure Google + Profile About Mark