Microsoft gives directions to Vic Govt and keeps the IP

by Stan Beer

Sunday, 19 March 2006

Microsoft this week demonstrated its Directions Plus application for the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games, in a development that delivers a wireless online public transport directions system to Victoria, while the software vendor gets to keep the intellectual property.

The Directions Plus system, developed at a cost of $900,000 over five months, equips designated Commonwealth Games officials with handheld PCs and belt harnessed thermal printers. The PCs are connected wirelessly by a GPRS network to back-end servers which respond to requests for directions to Games venues with printouts of detailed instructions on how to get from point A to point B using public transport.

The money for the system, which is claimed to be the first of its type in the world, came from the $5 million e-Government fund, established in 2002 as part of the $80 million four-year desktop software deal between Microsoft and the Victorian Government.

Local software companies Geomatic Technologies and Readify were sub-contracted to deliver the solution but the resulting intellectual property will stay with Microsoft, which intends to use it to sell similar solutions around the world.

Also on the display this week and throughout the Commonwealth Games will be the Microsoft-developed M2006 website, which was developed over 12 months by a 12-person development team within the Microsoft solutions development centre in Sydney. The site has been designed to hold 5000 content items and to withstand 1.8 million page views a day.

Mindful of some of the spectacular major events systems failures of the past, such as the IBM system meltdown at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, Microsoft has pulled out all stops to make sure the Games website stays up and running 100% of the time. According to project manager, James Simpson, manager of the solution development centre, the site has four levels of caching and is housed on a single server farm within Telstra, with 24 inter-connected servers. “It took 2000 person days to develop and we’re not allowed any downtime,” says Simpson. So far the site has performed well with good response times, but there is still a way to go before the Games are finished.

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