Brian Nourse of Melbourne was CIO at Glasgow 2014. He held similar roles at Delhi 2010 and Melbourne 2006. Methinks he along with a number of others who did such marvellous work at Glasgow will certainly be in the sights of Gold Coast 2018. Maybe they need to be quick.
Some Glasgow people have been snapped up by Baku 2015; Aussie Greg Warnecke, head of sport at Glasgow 2014, is to join the 2017 World Masters Games in Auckland as general manager, sports and venues.
Getting back to Glasgow, Brian Nourse estimates that more than 10,000 different devices connected to the wireless solutions across the venues, which is a huge number for a Commonwealth Games. When Nourse was appointed to deliver the technology strategy for the organising committee, he joined a team of just 25 people. By the time the Games arrived, that team had expanded to 1,500, of which 900 were based in the Technology Operations Centre (TOC), plus 15,000 volunteers (also known as ‘Clyde-siders’).
He adopted a risk-averse approach yet maintained capacity for scalability and flexibility. Imagine the integration challenge.
Dell was official hardware partner, providing 50 servers, 123TB of storage and 2,400 PCs and tablets, 100 of which were available for loan in the Athletes’ Village.
Atos hosted the Dell infrastructure at its Livingstone data centre, and also supported 50,811 applications on the volunteer portal.
Cisco was the networking partner. They provided 2,500 IP phones, three wireless controllers and 440 network switches.
Virgin Media delivered 2,600 mobile phones and set up a WiFi network on Glasgow Green.
Boston Networks installed 110,000 metres of fibre optic cabling and delivered 34,000 hours of engineering expertise. Toshiba provided 650 printers and multi-function devices.
And NVT Group, local, was the sole services integrator – configuring 10,000 secure network ports.
