Turin Olympic Stadium, February 11, when the world's largest winter sports event the Olympic Winter Games unveiled the curtain, a young Chinese focused his attention on several computer screens in front of him, but he was not watching the sports gala.

The 24-year-old Zuo Nan had no time to enjoy the grand opening, although he was just a couple of metres from the sports field, because he had a more important task to do: manage the technical support centre for the Olympic Games.

At Atos Origin, the Worldwide Information Technology (IT) Partner to the Olympic Games, people like Zuo are called voiceless heroes, serving those glamorous athletes and billions of people watching the games.

While the mission of Atos Origin, the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), is to serve all participants to the Olympic Games from 2002 to 2012, it is largely a voiceless hero; one of its goals is to have its voice heard in the Chinese market with an elevated profile and technological strength from the Games.

"This Olympic sponsorship will help us showcase the company's capabilities and establish strong brand awareness in China," said Bernard Bourigeaud, chairman of the Management Board and chief executive officer with the Europe-based IT service provider.

As the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games is less than 700 days away, Atos Origin, the worldside IT sponsor, has accelerated its pace for the first Olympic Games in the world's most populous country.

The leading international IT service company in Europe began to prepare for the Games four years ago, as China wants to make the event the best in history and Atos Origin also wants to show its customers and potential clients in China its capabilities.

At present, Atos Origin, which manages systems from sports result reporting, broadcasting to audience identity verification, and uses a sophisticated system developed by the company itself to protect information, already has some 50 people working together with organizers, other Olympic partners and sponsors, and the team will grow to more than 400 in 2008.

Bourigeaud said in an interview concurrently with the visit of French President Jacques Chirac to China that considering the size, complexity and popularity of each Olympic Games, it is always a challenge at each session, but in Beijing, there are some new challenges.

The Beijing Olympic Games has three official languages and for a Europe-focused company like Atos Origin, Chinese can be one challenge, said Bourigeaud.

For many engineers, familiar with English and French interfaces of IT programmes, now they have another demanding task: to face a Chinese version.

To cope with that, Atos Origin's Olympics team in Beijing hires one Chinese teacher for each of the non-Chinese-speaking employees.

As China is going to introduce many new technologies into the world's biggest games in 2008, the complexity of IT services will be more demanding.

However, Bourigeaud believes it will just provide a good platform for Atos Origin to demonstrate its technological strength to the world and especially its customers in China.

"If we can do what we do for the Games, we can do it for any other business," he said.

"The expertise that we gain from delivering this complex and time-critical project will be transferred to other global clients that are looking to us to deliver similar high-performance IT infrastructures where real-time data is paramount."

China, already one of the biggest IT hardware makers and buyers in the world, will see the demands of organizations from hardware to software and services, a globally proven migration roadmap.

Boosted with an elevated profile as an IOC Olympic partner, Atos Origin is gaining increased recognition from its Chinese customers.

Today, Atos Origin has already become a solution supplier to the Bank of China and China Construction Bank, as well as to the control system of gas in Xi'an, an ancient Chinese capital in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province.

China has become a strategic market for the European firm in its blueprint, especially in the Asia-Pacific region.

Atos Origin has set a goal to grow the share of its Asia Pacific region from the current 4 per cent to 10 per cent and in the first half of this year, employment growth in the region was the highest among all its regional markets at 13 per cent.

The total number of employees in the Asia-Pacific region was 2,850 and more than 1,000 of them were in the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Bourigeaud said that his company did quite well in China in its three traditional business sectors: card payment services, ERP solutions in the manufacturing industry, and IT infrastructure operations and management.

It is also looking at other opportunities in new business segments, such as professional services from IT to banking and telecommunications, which have a huge demand in China, as well as areas where the company enjoys a global competitiveness.

(China Daily 10/25/2006 page23)