THE CUTTING EDGE / Case Study: How technology changed a business : World Cup Goes High-Tech : Technology: Computer firms pool talent to bring latest communications systems to sports championship.
Former Venezuelan soccer star Cheche Vidal hung up his cleats years ago, but when the World Cup soccer championship--the most-watched sporting event on the planet--kicks off this summer, he’ll have a lot more on his mind than winning a game.
Vidal is vice president of technology for World Cup USA 1994 Inc. He is in charge of what is perhaps the most advanced computer and telecommunications system yet designed for a sporting event.
World Cup USA 1994, the Los Angeles-based organizer of this year’s soccer championship, is responsible for bringing the playoff to the United States for the first time. The 52-match series begins June 17 at stadiums in nine cities across the country. Seven of the games, including the final one, will be played at the Rose Bowl.
Behind the four-week championship will be a computer system that uses the latest technology, including computer networking, multimedia and high-speed fiber-optic communications.
Designing the system was a considerable challenge to World Cup officials. “No one was prepared for the staggering dimension of the job of generating a working environment for an event the size of the World Cup championships,” Vidal said.
According to Vidal, the system will be used by about 50,000 people as an aid to daily administration and operations--for tasks such as the instant dispensing of photo identification passes to players, coaches, referees and World Cup employees.
One of the most far-reaching applications of the computer system will be the World Cup News Service. Designed for the use of the 3.6 million ticket holders, as well as the 7,500 to 10,000 journalists who will cover the matches, it is intended to be an easy-to-use source of timely information about the games, statistics, rules and players’ biographies.
The system’s database will also contain historical data on the 64-year-old World Cup and the 3,000 games and 20,000 players that have participated in the quadrennial competition.
The computers will also be linked to closed-circuit TV that will feed statistics to broadcasters during the games. You don’t have to go to the game to get to the information, though. The general public will have access to it via the CompuServe network.
The World Cup’s computer system blends technology from some of the most prominent suppliers: The computers are on loan from Sun Microsystems Inc., and telecommunications giant Sprint International will provide the fiber-optic communications to link up the international network. Two Sun SparcCenter 2000 servers--computers that serve as the main repository of data and software for the system--in Dallas will anchor the network.
Systems integrator EDS--Ross Perot’s former firm--designed the system and wrote some of its most critical software.
All three of the firms are marketing partners of the World Cup, as are several other companies. In exchange for donations of $5 million each, they’ll receive special advertising and promotional benefits.
“With their partnership, we’ve been able to capitalize on the most advanced of established technology,” said Bill Alaoglu, assistant vice president of technology for World Cup USA.
The World Cup’s system will have about 1,000 computer workstations distributed among approximately 50 smaller networks in the nine host cities. But because of the “distributed computing” technology used, every computer user will have access to any item of data or software program in the system, whether the information is in a computer across the room or across the country.
A system of this sort is nothing unusual in the halls of big business, but the logistic demands of the World Cup nevertheless made this project unusually tricky. One problem was time.
“We have to put up a nationwide and international information system, but instead of having three years to describe the system and two years to develop it, we’ve had to get the whole thing up and running in a year and a half,” Alaoglu said.
Space was another challenge. The World Cup’s host cities--Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, New York, Washington and Orlando--are in four time zones.
The system also had to be linked with soccer’s international parent organization, the Zurich-based Federation Internationale de Football. Already, about half of the system--or about 500 workstations--is in place. But the rest can’t go up until the stadiums and other hotel and office spaces are free, and that won’t happen until the last minute.
“We’re going to have as little as 10 days to set up the office buildings, physically lay cabling for the computer networks and deploy 500 more workstations,” said Bud Bencic, the EDS account executive on the World Cup project.
World Cup officials expect that 1.6 billion people--nearly a third of the world population--will watch the final game on July 17 in Pasadena.
