London Olympics Says No To Open Source

Open Source software represents too much of a risk in terms of application compatibility to be used widely in the London 2012 Olympics according to the chief information officer for the event.

Speaking at the Green IT 09 conference in London today, Gerry Pennell, chief information officer of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) said that he was unable to explore the potential of open source as a more energy and financially efficient alternative to proprietary platforms due to the issue of application compatibility.

“My primary driver here is to deliver the Olympics and that means using proven applications software and by and large that application software does not run on open standards – there are some exceptions to that we are running a little bit of Linux but by and large it is Windows orientated,” he said.

Pennell added that although he had no plans to use significant amounts of open source software, he didn’t believe that servers running Linux would be more efficient than proprietary platforms. “I doubt it drives any huge difference in terms of the number of servers involved,” he said.

While there is still much debate about whether open source software such as Linux is more sustainable from a power management perspective than proprietary platforms, some open source enthusiasts are clear on the benefits of open standards.

“It is a fact that Microsoft in particular uses the power it has got to make people buy more hardware and junk their old hardware and this is why the US Green Party joined with the Free Software Foundation to condemn Windows Vista,” free software proponent Richard Stallman told eWeek recently.

Pennell was at the two day conference to discuss sustainable approaches to IT being undertaken in the run up to the games. He claimed that as well as making sure that the IT systems being used were as sustainable as possible, his mandate is to come up with ways to use IT to make the whole games more efficient and environment friendly.

“Sustainability is central to us. I don’t actually have massive sales job in terms of the rest of the organisation and the importance of sustainability – that one is in the bag.” he said.

One of the ways IT is being used to make the whole event more sustainable is reducing the amount of air-travel related to logistics in the run to the event. “There is the danger of an awful lot of people spending an awful lot of time on planes so we are looking at ways we can use IT to reduce the amount of air-travel that goes on,” said Pennell.

Unlike most organisations, Pennell said that the Olympic organising committee doesn’t have a legacy of IT to deal with which can often be source of inefficiency and cost. “I am starting with a clean sheet of paper which is a great advantage when it comes to designing and implementing stuff that is green from the get go,” he explained.

However one of the challenges faced by the organisers of the event is the fixed time-frame which means there is no room for project overrun and according to Pennell that means that he has to be risk averse. “There are 1177 days to go and we can’t, we won’t be late. That means that my appetite for risk from stuff that is new is quite moderate as you might expect,” he said.

One of the targets for the London games is to reduce the millions of sheets of paper that were printed out at the Beijing games associated with producing results according to Pennell. For the London games, the organisers are developing an information system called Info 2012 in an attempt to cut down on paper usage that will for example allow media at the event to get electronic access to information and avoid printing.

In March, the main IT consultants for the games, Atos Origin released a statement detailing sustainable IT plans for 2012.  Technologies such as server virtualisation will be used to improve the efficiency of the IT systems required for the games and help cut the amount of hardware required compared to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.