Greetings live from Vancouver, which is as exciting and excited as it looks on TV! I am made the trip up to the area to do some work promoting our sustainability story and to get some first hand accounts of Avaya's work during the Olympics. This is a very exciting trip and I am hoping to be able to bring a taste of the Games experience and feel to readers of the blog.
I flew up from San Francisco yesterday morning/afternoon, and have been very impressed with the ability of the infrastructure to manage the volume of people that are in the Vancouver area. The airport and public transport into and around the city center worked like a charm and it would have surprisingly easy to forget the Games were going on, expect for the hundreds upon hundreds of Team Canada hockey jerseys that everyone was wearing with pride. The smoothness of the transportation network is a credit to all the planning that was undertaken leading up to the Olympics and in my thus-far limited experience; it seems to have been quite successful. I wonder how much of this success is attributed to technology travel abatement of the type I discussed in my last post?
Walking around the city a bit, it was cool to see how immersed the city is in its Games. Every storefront seems to have a TV with one of the events going on, be it Canada's third gold medal in skier cross, the omnipresent curling or one of the four men's hockey games that were going on yesterday. This was a visual reminder for me of the ubiquity of the Olympics, as it reinforced the massive amount of data/broadcasts flowing out from the events, getting to every storefront in Vancouver in the local context, but also being broadcast out to millions of TV's, laptops and handheld devices throughout the world.
After a bit of exploring and getting my bearings, I headed over to the Avaya demonstration center in the center of Vancouver and got settled in with the dedicated team that has been working so hard to make the Games a success. They have been doing everything they can to share the story of the converged network infrastructure behind the Games, integrated so closely with the work of Bell Canada, VANOC, Atos Orgin and other sponsors/suppliers. The demo center showcases many of Avaya's core products and has been the nerve center for much of the Games-times activities.
I am going to wrap up here for now, but check back often on the blog as I will be posting multiple updates from Vancouver over the next several days.
Also, don't forget to follow green avaya on twitter at @greenavaya.
Posted 24 Feb 2010 at 10:51 AM