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IAAF TO HOST WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS WITH NTT EUROPE ONLINE

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) agreed a deal with NTT Europe Online to host and secure its website during the Osaka World Championships this month.

During the event, dedicated teams will produce video clips, live results and other features while IAAF journalists will publish news and pictures directly to the IAAF website, creating a vast information resource for athletics fans across the globe.

Athletes will compete in more than twenty-five different disciplines at Osaka, with many of the events taking place simultaneously - driving traffic to the site as fans check on their athletes’ progress. To cope with these traffic spikes, the IAAF taps into NTT Europe Online’s Smart Content Delivery service (SCD), which uses a number of strategically located cache servers throughout Europe, the USA and Asia/Pacific to balance the load - meaning no single server has to handle all of the user demand.

“We are an international organisation, with more members than the UN and millions of fans worldwide. They rely on us to deliver a quality service. This is a great responsibility and we have therefore taken every possible measure to ensure the integrity of the website during the event,” said Emanuele Perotti Nigra, Head of Information Technology at the IAAF. “The World Championships generates enormous interest so we needed a hosting partner that we knew could deliver for us. NTT Europe Online has a global reputation and an unsurpassed track record in sports for successful hosting implementations - making it the obvious choice.”

Christopher Quinton, Country Manager for France at NTT Europe Online adds: “Our engineers and technical teams have worked with the IAAF to create a tailor-made solution to fit its exact requirements. We have extensive experience providing secure and robust infrastructure and hosting solutions to cope with the phenomenal demand on internet bandwidth generated by global events such as the World Championships. We take great pride in being able to offer our customers industry leading availability and security assurances.”