Greek Geeks Earns High Scores On Olympics Web Site

The 2004 Summer Olympics went off nearly without a hitch.

Not only were the physical venues ready on time—a subject of much worry—but the Olympic Web site, www.athens2004.com, ran like clockwork. That is no mean feat. Just ask IBM how difficult it is to keep an Olympic Web site running, given the well-publicized snafus it had during the 1996 games in Atlanta.

For that reason, an Athens-based VAR dubbed The Greek Geeks can take a bow. The Greek Geeks, led by General Manager Harris Thomadakis, won the job with Vignette as its portal and content management vendor of choice.

The content management challenge was huge. Aside from displaying static information, the site had to deal with multiple realtime feeds. One set for official final results had to update within minutes of the contests' completion. Other feeds furnished realtime information on events in progress. The various feeds often had their own data format that had to be integrated.

The VAR presented its proposal in February 2003, competing with some 15 companies, Thomadakis said. The field was narrowed to three consortia, one led by his company with Vignette technologies, another that pitched Microsoft technology and a third that included Oracle's wares.The proposal: To install a new data center using IBM WebSphere Application Server Version 5, IBM DB2 Version 7, Vignette Content Management Release 7.3.0 and Microsoft Internet Information Server 5.

Among the first orders of the day was to figure out how to bring in all sorts of data from various documents and databases. Here, Vignette's Data Integration Studio proved invaluable, said Christiana Kogevina, software development director for the Greek Geeks. The deadline, however, was tight. All existing data and applications had to be migrated to the new system by December 2003, per the International Olympic Committee, Thomadakis said. And although that work started in October, the Greek Geeks finished on time.

Thomadakis and Vignette executives are clearly pleased. During the two-week extravaganza, the site managed more than 51 million daily page views in French, English and Greek. Total page views throughout were 650 million. Content included more than 7,500 individual result tables, 12,000 athlete biographies and 25,000 static files, according to Vignette, Austin, Texas.

High-profile projects such as this one are typically more beneficial as success stories than as profit centers. Thomadakis hopes this reference account will help the VAR parlay the success of the Olympic site into more business. In the contest for building high-availability Web sites, the VAR may have scored a perfect 10.