Atos readies ‘adaptive and intimate’ Invictus Games IT service

The Invictus Games has chosen Atos to provide IT services that will underpin the tournament in Canada next February.

Organisers of the tournament will harness the Atos’s wide experience of international sporting events such as the Olympic Games and football’s UEFA European Championship (Euros), in what Nacho Moros, Atos’s head of major events, described as an “adaptive and intimate” service, which includes processing and distributing results data.

The Invictus Games is a tournament for wounded, injured and sick servicemen and women, including those currently serving and veterans. Its first event was hosted in London in 2014.

The latest pit stop for Atos will be in Canadian city Vancouver and skiing resort Whistler, after the French IT company was named official technology partner for the Invictus Games for the second time.

The event will see 550 competitors from up to 25 countries take part in 11 adaptive sports.

Fresh from holding a similar role at the Paris Olympic Games and Paralympics, as well as the Euros, Atos will provide all the technology supporting the tournament data, as well as IT equipment and IT systems management. This includes project and operations management, systems providing event timing and scoring, an on-venue results system, and results distribution managed through Amazon Web Services’ (AWS’s) cloud.

A team of 50 Atos IT specialists will travel to Canada from Europe, with another 10 supporting the event from Spain.

Moros told Computer Weekly: “The event itself is super interesting and motivating, and it is a challenge for us to show that we can be flexible to apply our service to big and not-so-big events.

“I would say about 90% of the team working on the Invictus Games were involved in the Paris Olympics, but in terms of scale and complexity it is totally different,” he said. “The challenge is to be flexible to accommodate our service to the real needs of this event and scale down.”

Atos is currently finalising its preparation in terms of basic software to run the tournament. This included setting up temporary IT infrastructure, which was challenging due to time constraints and venue variability. “It is about 90% complete and we are now working on the integration of the central result system using AWS,” said Moros.

He added that the central results system processes data from all sports and distributes it “to the world” in real time.

All preparation will be complete before the end of the year and, in January 2025, Atos staff will begin travelling to Canada to do the onsite installation of timing and scoring equipment, as well as cameras and more.

The event hosts alpine skiing, snowboarding, Nordic cross-country, biathlon, skeleton, wheelchair Basketball, wheelchair Rugby, sitting Volleyball, curling, swimming and indoor rowing.

Invictus Games Vancouver Whistler 2025 CEO Scott Moore said: “This collaboration is a game-changer, as it allows us to leverage innovative technology to enhance the experience for our competitors, their families and our global audience.”