As Published In May 2004

The World's Eyes Turn to Greece
By Lynn Tryba & Jay Weisz

In every athlete's life comes a moment when every last bit of strength and endurance must be exerted just to make it over the finish line. For three organizations facing the challenges of the 2004 Olympic Games, a similar moment is soon approaching. Each of these entities—the Athens 2004 Olympic Organizing Committee, Athens International Airport, and OTE—is critical to the success of the Games. Each has spent months, if not years, preparing for the 17 days in August when all the athletes and IT systems in Athens will be pushed to their limit. Find out how they're meeting the challenge—and learn how you can benefit from the innovative, cost-effective techniques they've developed to address the needs of the biggest event of 2004.

Let the Games Begin
Athens 2004 Olympic Organizing Committee

You must admit, the logical choice of a database for the Olympic Games being held this August in Athens would have to be...Oracle. But the name alone wasn't sufficient justification. When the final scores were tallied, Oracle received high marks for maturity, flexibility, and scalability—and was chosen the winner.

"Under the auspices of Atos Origin, the official IT systems sponsor for the Athens 2004 Olympic Games," explains Dimitris Beis, general manager of technologies for the Athens 2004 Olympic Organizing Committee (ATHOC), "we selected Oracle as our database. It is important that the Olympic Games use only software and systems that are mature and flexible. For the last two Games, the Olympics has found this in the Oracle Database with Real Application Clusters."

Everything Old Is New Again

The system Atos Origin will be managing under Beis' authority has two primary components: the games management system, or GMS, and the Real-Time Diffusion System (RTDS), the system that users will access to get the information they need to perform their jobs. "All of this information needs a central repository, which is Oracle," Beis says. "The GMS gives us the ability to meet the needs of everyone associated with the Games, from the major items such as accommodations, staffing, and scheduling down to some minor systems, such as the protocol system. We'll handle everything from their arrival in Greece until their departure. We're here to support the Games, a sporting event. We don't want to run a parallel Olympiad in IT; we do not want to risk even the smallest failure during the Games."

Until 2004, Beis says, accreditation at the Games meant sending paper forms to people for them to fill out and return, after which they could attend only the events they were authorized to attend. "E-accreditation is a new application we are building for the Athens Games," Beis says. "We'll implement it fully here and test and evaluate it to determine how best to do accreditation in the future via the internet."

But other IT innovations are planned as well. "We have quite a few nice surprises for the 2004 Games," Beis says. "For example, we are developing, with our sponsor Samsung, a system called WOW (Wireless Olympic World). It will provide information to users on their wireless devices, PDAs, or laptops about everything taking place at the Games. The press, athletes, or any officials will be able to get all the information they need wirelessly. They can communicate with each other. They can even book their meetings online. And while they are in their meetings, they can keep up on the particular sports or athletes that interest them."

No Time for Error

As you might imagine, the preparation required of the IT professionals supporting the Games is almost an Olympic achievement in itself. "You must apply management techniques that don't leave any gaps in project follow-up," says Beis, who has a 27-year background in managing large electric utility implementations. "You've got to be able to discover and verify problems, and develop the processes you'll put in place to solve them, in a very short time frame."

All IT operations face risks of breaches of and intrusions into their systems, but the Olympics pose a unique challenge. "Prior to the Olympics, and more so during the Games, the organizing committee Web sites become a focal point for everyone who wants to make themselves and their hacking capabilities known," Beis says. "They swarm here like bees to honey. We address this in two ways: We implement the best security measures and products available to us, such as the Oracle Database, but we also work to minimize the number of physical connections between our various systems. This way, if there's a hacking problem on the Web site, it can't be propagated to the core or peripheral systems we're using during the Games. Of course, our personnel have been checked and accredited. Between our physical security measures, our IT security management, and the way we've selected and implemented the architecture, there's very little, if any, room left for someone to penetrate the core systems of the Olympic Games."

Team Spirit

To prepare the IT infrastructure, which also uses Sun Microsystems servers and Intel-based Dell hardware, Beis' team has been working on and testing every aspect of the system in a 1,000-square-meter integration lab at the headquarters of the ATHOC. "We've been testing everything since November 2002, and since August 2003, we've been using it to operate the eight qualifying events being held here in Greece," Beis says.

In addition to the professionals being provided under Atos Origin's sponsorship, the ATHOC is working with experts from Swiss Timing, who will provide the game results systems; Xerox, which is providing print capabilities; and Oracle Support. "We have 100 people on our team," Beis says. "Their job is to coordinate between the various sponsors and be a focal point for anyone in the Olympic family who needs help. IT interfaces with every aspect of the ATHOC. In the beginning, we supply our 'customers' with information. Then we become implementers and integrators.

A few months before the actual Games, we take on another role, as part of venue management." For the Athens Games, there will be 36 athletic venues and another 36 noncompetitive venues to manage things such as hospitality areas and media villages. "We can manage the systems on-site with the teams we have there, and we can manage them remotely through our core systems as well. For the Oracle piece of it, we have a contract with Oracle to have experts on-site to build, operate, and optimize the database and to help with problem discovery," says Beis.

Meeting the Challenge

So, although modern-day Greeks are no doubt excited and proud that the competitions they instituted in Olympia thousands of years ago will once again return home to Greece, what, according to Beis, might have been the reaction of the ancients to all this sophisticated technology? "They might not have predicted it, but they would have found a nice way of describing this evolution into the central philosophy of their times, into the ability of humans to deliver value."—J.W.

Becoming Greek
Athens International Airport

Right now thousands of athletes are in the final stretch, preparing for the 2004 Olympics to be held in Athens, Greece, this August. Organizations around Athens, including the recently constructed Athens International Airport (AIA), are also going through their final paces. "Originally we put everything in place to be a state-of-the-art airport, extremely innovative and service-oriented," explains Fotis Karonis, the AIA's director of IT and telecommunications. "All of our systems were connected to a single Oracle database running the Oracle E-Business Suite: our flight information display systems, everything the airport community needs for operating productively and efficiently, and the corporate systems the airport authority uses to measure costs and revenues to accurately forecast future challenges and opportunities. Now, we've moved up one more step, into an era of business engineering and business intelligence, and we're taking the knowledge—the intelligence—and pushing it deeper and deeper into our organization, to line managers and operations supervisors, and sharing it with our partners in the Athens Airport community as well. A single Oracle data warehouse holds everything from flight operations to financial information, and using our business intelligence tools, we can translate that and combine it into a very effective decision-support tool."

There are very few airports in the world, Karonis says, where "you can touch a button and immediately see your passenger numbers for the previous day—or even your current numbers. We can do that, for our partners and ourselves. That was very important for top-level management, and we've had it from Day 1 here at the new airport. Now, that intelligence, and everything else that goes with it, is pushed out to the entire airport's production chain. We can look at the runway usage in the course of a 24-hour period. We can look at arrivals, departures, the usage of gates and baggage belts—all of the airport's resources are there, online."

That type of information, says Karonis, was very difficult to obtain before. "You had Microsoft Excel spreadsheets everywhere. It could take weeks for executives to receive reports they'd requested. Now, using the E-Business Suite and the intelligence tools we have in Oracle Financial Analyzer, it's easy. And it gives us the opportunity to realize a very rapid return on investment, not just for the IT systems but also on the investments in the airport itself. We hire fewer people, and our partners hire fewer people, because we all work more efficiently. With the time we save by using this intelligence, we diversify and increase our service portfolio."

IT That Makes Money

Another vital approach Karonis and the AIA used for reducing the amortization period of the information technology infrastructure was to turn IT from a cost center into a revenue producer. "When we first came together to design the new airport, we asked ourselves, 'What's the best-possible scenario for IT?'" The answer lies in bundling IT and telecommunications services for the airport's nearly 300 operators, everyone from caterers to retail shopkeepers, and providing them a one-stop shop for all their IT and telecom needs at the airport. The IT department at the Athens Airport contributes about €8.5 million to the authority's coffers annually, and given other opportunities coming its way in Greece and abroad, that number is expected to double over the next few years.

The initial intelligence Karonis' IT department provided proved so valuable that as the airport evolved, some IT investments took priority over other, more traditional, aviation investments. "The aviation industry has always been volatile and one that is deeply and rapidly affected by geopolitical events. After 9/11 we had to make some very quick decisions about our priorities," Karonis says. "There were some investment opportunities elsewhere at the airport, and we brought our IT case to the board as well. It came down to investing in two more gates or investing in business intelligence. The decision was made to invest in business intelligence, because the business intelligence tools would allow us to forecast the good and the bad even better. We could be more factual in our decision-making for everything."

An Olympic Challenge

Normally, the AIA handles about 12.3 million passengers per year—some 500 flights daily. During the peak period around the Olympics, the AIA expects to have around 800 flights daily and to process as many as 4,000 passengers an hour. "As the primary port of entry for visitors coming to Athens for the Games, the airport is fully integrated into the Olympic experience, and the Olympic Games have been a golden opportunity for us to innovate," Karonis says.

Perhaps one of the most innovative technological developments prompted by the impending Games was the implementation and use of wireless technologies, specifically Wi-Fi. "A wireless local-area network (LAN) has been part of our daily life for over a year now, and we will use it heavily during the Games," Karonis explains. "Not only will passengers be able to use their wireless devices, PDAs, or laptops from the hotspots we have throughout the terminal but we'll also use the LAN for operational purposes. We'll be using it for tasks such as doing accreditation, setting up mobile police kiosks, handling extra queues for passport control and security check-in, and even providing mobile flight information display systems. If the airlines request it, we can give them mobile check-in facilities that look just like hot-dog carts," Karonis says, laughing. "They can do check-in, issue boarding passes—everything."

In and Out

To maintain the "one-stop shop" of IT and telecommunications services, Karonis and the AIA rely on a combination of in-house and outsourced expertise. "Some things such as managerial skills, project management skills, key technology, database management, and network design skills are essential to have internally. But other things are best put out to tender," Karonis says. "We do about 70 percent of the work internally, and the rest is outsourced—things like desktop management and the IT help desk we operate around the clock for our customers.

"We manage things like the Oracle E-Business Suite ourselves, using certified consultants and developers. The architecture in the E-Business Suite and the way the modules are set up are so easy now that we can do things ourselves easily and quickly. Whereas we might have needed a year and a half or two years before to develop an enterprise resource planning application, it now takes us only a couple of weeks, just as the upgrade from one version of the E-Business Suite to another took only a matter of weeks," he adds.

Taking the outsourcing concept a step further, the AIA is taking the IT and telecom skills and knowledge it has developed running its own airport and offers them as a combined service to other airports. "We've done it already in Düsseldorf, and we're working with Oracle in Poland and hopefully in Egypt soon too," says Karonis. "The line between information technology and telecommunications is disappearing. Soon there won't be a separate IT department and a separate telecom unit. The companies that will be really competitive are those that can offer a bundled service, such as what we have here. We're offering to provide that to other airports and even large travel agencies. They're already saying, 'We have to manage a lot of contracts; hardware, software, internet, and telecommunications companies; Wi-Fi; and so on.' We're saying, 'Let us manage all that complexity for you, remotely. You'll save a lot of money, and we'll make all your integration problems go away.'"

Whatever it is that Karonis and his team are doing, it seems to be working. The airport has received numerous awards from the International Air Transport Association and the European Union for excellence in aviation. Although the successful handling of hundreds of thousands of 2004 Olympics visitors promises to be its greatest achievement yet, you get the feeling that, with Fotis Karonis in charge and the support of Oracle technologies, it won't be the AIA's last gold-medal performance. —J.W.

Can You Hear Me Now?
Hellenic Telecommunications Organization (OTE)

If you were a telephone company and the world came a-calling, it would be a good thing, right? But the prospect of the world converging on Athens for the Olympic Games this August is also daunting for OTE, the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization. "We're expecting a huge surge in volume that month," says Konstantinos Kappos, OTE's chief information officer. "Based on previous Games, the surge may be as much as 100 percent, from several hundred thousand to perhaps more than a million people above what we normally have. And they will want fast, reliable telecommunications services, everything from wire lines to mobile service and internet connections. But we are very confident in our systems based on the Oracle E-Business Suite, especially the ones designed and implemented for the Games."

The Team Approach

The 2004 Olympic Games certainly had an impact on OTE's planning, but an even broader impact was realized from the deregulation of Greece's telecom market, in 2001, and also from Greece's entry into the European Union. OTE, which comprises three major business units: OTE, the fixed-telephony company; Cosmote, the Greek mobile phone service provider; and OTEnet, the internet provider, had to rapidly adapt to changes in the marketplace and meet competitors head-on—both inside and outside Greece.

"We've had competition in the wireless and internet business here for about 10 years," Kappos says. "But for OTE, deregulation was a fairly new situation. We needed a new infrastructure, and just as important, we needed to change our way of thinking about customer service.

Snapshots Athens 2004 Olympic Organizing Committee www.athens2004.com The Athens 2004 Olympic Organizing Committee is fully responsible for the Athens 2004 Olympic and Paralympic Games and for coordination of all other entities involved in the preparation and organization of the Games. Founded: 1998 Number of employees: 3,500, increasing to an estimated 6,000 during the Games Software: Oracle Database, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Diagnostics Pack, Oracle Tuning Pack Athens International Airport www.aia.gr The state-of-the-art Athens International Airport is the biggest infrastructure project in Greece and a pioneer international public/ private partnership, as the first major greenfield airport built with the aid of the public sector. Opened: March 2001 Number of employees: 697 Software: Oracle Database; Oracle Application Server; Oracle Real Application Clusters; Oracle Developer Suite; and Oracle E-Business Suite, including Financials, Order Management, Purchasing, Inventory, iProcurement, and Sourcing OTE S.A.-Hellenic Telecommunications Organization www.ote.gr OTE S.A., along with subsidiaries such as COSMOTE and OTEnet, is one of the leading companies in Greece. With a market capitalization of approximately US$6.5 billion, OTE is the largest Greek company listed on the Athens Stock Exchange and is active in the fixed and mobile telephony markets of Southeastern Europe. Founded: 1949 Number of employees: 17,100 Software: Oracle Database; Oracle E-Business Suite, including General Ledger, Financials, Supply Chain Management, Projects, and Human Resources

"The telecom sector is unique," says Kappos. "You find enterprise resource planning systems, intranets, internets, and e-business in other industries. What you don't find is that these systems have to be connected to a telecommunications network. Our systems have to understand the customers like no other. The customer relationship management system has to connect to the billing systems, and with these types of broad networks, service activation and network management have to happen automatically."

To achieve the automation it was looking for, OTE turned to Oracle and the Oracle E-Business Suite. "We decided on taking a suite approach long before it was popular," says Kappos. "We were convinced that IT is all about information flow, and that means information integrity and the ability to combine all your different sources of information to make one integrated whole. We knew we would require a common system to serve our needs and our customers' needs best. Because this is a very large investment for any organization, implementing an integrated system such as the Oracle E-Business Suite yields the highest return on investment, because you don't have to maintain several systems or the integration between them. The costs are just lower.

"We began by implementing Oracle General Ledger, Financials, Supply Chain Management, and the Human Resources Management System," Kappos explains. "We have about 2,000 users in this E-Business Suite environment. Now we are moving forward on two new initiatives. The first is our corporate, business-to-business-focused initiative. We're creating a new customer relationship management platform to serve our largest commercial customers. The second is the system we created just for the Olympics. As the official telecommunications provider for the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, OTE is a major national sponsor of the Games. The application we built with the E-Business Suite will handle everything necessary to meet the needs of the Olympic family: athletes, officials, media, and visitors."

Expanding Borders

In addition to increasing its domestic business, which operates in every telecom sector throughout Greece, OTE is also pursuing opportunities in Europe's emerging markets, including the Balkans, Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria. "We own and operate mobile and fixed networks in these countries," says Kappos. "They are very challenging, because their economies are still somewhat less strong compared to other, more established markets. But the opportunities for reward are equal to the risk. There's little competition there still, and if we can maintain or improve our market share as those economies grow, we will reap big benefits."

These types of investments, as large as they are, cannot be undertaken without some understanding of the payback they will produce. "We did a return-on-investment study before we began," Kappos says, "and two years into it, our results are very close to our original calculations, which showed a 50-percent return over a seven-to-eight-year period."

Strengthening the Supply Chain

One of the areas in which OTE has seen the most significant gains is in its supply chain management, especially as it relates to project management. Kappos explains, "A telecommunications network is something that changes daily as products and services are introduced and phased out. All of this influences our supply chain and how efficiently we can manage our projects. The benefits we've gained from Oracle Supply Chain Management and Oracle Projects have been substantial. We've reduced by more than 20 percent the time it takes to purchase and receive materials for our network. Equally important, we were able to create a picture of our inventory that has enabled us to reduce it from the previous year by 50 percent. That's a huge amount to gain in one year."

In addition to the E-Business Suite modules OTE is already running, the company introduced Oracle Marketing Online, initially as a standalone application. Whatever the outcome of the Games, one thing is clear: Using its Oracle applications, OTE is set to run—and win—the telecommunications marathon. —L.T.