By Rick Echevarria, vice president, Sales, Marketing and Communications Group and general manager of the Olympic Program at Intel Corporation
The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, the biggest sporting event in the world, are now in full swing. Like the athletes competing, the thousands of people working behind the scenes for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in over 20 global locations need the right tools to maintain peak performance.
That’s because these Olympic Games will be the most “virtual” experience yet—and in the wake of the pandemic, the IOC will be supporting the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee to put on one of the biggest sporting events both on the ground, in Switzerland, and across the world. This presents a new technological challenge for the IOC. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the IOC to run most of its operations remotely, including managing business partnerships and conducting virtual tours, and keeping their teams collaborating.
To successfully support the Olympic Games, the IOC needed to refresh their fleet of four-year-old devices with next-generation technology that delivered a seamless and powerful user experience.
All of these challenges and technical requirements are exactly what the Intel® Evo™ vPro® platform and its new standard for professional-grade performance, predictable stability, multilayer security, and complete manageability were built to handle. As the industry leader in processor technologies, Intel is the Official Processor Partner of the Olympic Games.
Devices built on the Intel® Evo™ vPro® platform power business-critical workloads, maximize employee productivity, analyze data quickly, simplify connectivity, and extend battery life to help get the best work out of organizations like the IOC.
Help Supporting the Olympic Games from Around the World
Because of the unique circumstances caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the IOC transitioned to a hybrid model to support the Tokyo Organizing Committee from multiple locations all over the world, including the IOC headquarters in Switzerland, on the ground in Tokyo, and in various satellite locations.
IOC team members needed new technology that would deliver a seamless collaboration experience. This meant having the ability to simultaneously use standard office applications while also running remote connectivity and video collaboration tools—and not at the expense of processor speeds.
Also, with their updated fleet spread across the world, they had to manage device setup remotely. Devices built on the Intel® Evo™ vPro® platform are engineered to let organizations remotely manage, update, and restore every device, minimizing computing disruptions and maximizing productivity.
Getting employees set up on the new systems used to take the IOC hours—if not days—to complete. With the new Intel® Evo™ vPro® platform-based devices, it only took the IOC a fraction of that time.
These Intel® Evo™ vPro® platform-based devices—which are run on 11th Gen Intel® Core™ Processors—also met the IOC’s high-performance requirements. For instance, the IOC hosted the first-ever Olympic Virtual Experience Program, an endeavor that tested the limits of real-time processing—multiple virtual visits per week, hundreds of video participants, and thousands of live video minutes.
By using Intel® Evo™ vPro® platform-based devices, IOC team members can run these virtual tours with broadcast-grade video feeds while simultaneously hosting group video calls.
Predictable stability was another key requirement for the IOC in choosing a new fleet of devices. The Intel® Transparent Supply Chain, a set of policies and procedures that traces system components from the point of manufacture to help identify suspicious or counterfeit device components, gave the IOC an added layer of security to protect against malware and faulty hardware components.
As the global pandemic forced the IOC to work within a tight time frame, the Intel® Stable IT Platform Program (SIPP) gives the IOC the assurance that the hardware components of an Intel® Evo™ vPro® platform-powered device will be consistent for 15 months throughout the buying cycle or until the next generational release.
Stay tuned to find out more on how the IOC tackled Virtual Visits, collaborated remotely, and successfully supported the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 — all with the help of the Intel® Evo™ vPro® platform.
Devices on the Intel® Evo™ vPro® platform are a new class that gives IT the security and manageability they need and users the sleek design and performance they want.
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