Back in the days of the original Olympics, the ancient Greeks didn’t have much to worry about. They needed a place to hold their races and wrestling matches, and maybe a few laurel leaves for victory crowns. They certainly did not have to concern themselves with an enormous influx of visitors from all over the world and the problems those visitors create, such as housing, safety, traffic and communications.

But for the 2012 Olympics in London, the organizing committee has decided to address the communications concerns by using Cisco for its expertise in VoIP deployment and management solutions. According to an article by Dan Worth in The Inquirer, Cisco will be deploying 16,500 IP telephony handsets for the games, as well as its Webex conferencing service, 2,200 switches and 1,800 WiFi (News - Alert) access points throughout the city.

Aside from the hardware, though, Cisco is also lending its expertise in order to ensure that the systems can withstand everything from weather events to terrorist attacks. To do this, Cisco (News - Alert) will rely on its most proven products, and plans to deploy 30 technical experts to be on hand to deal with IT issues.

"We have to know how it will perform and that nothing will go wrong, so we use equipment like our Catalyst 6500, 3750 and 2960, which are some of our core server products," said Ian Foddering, chief technology officer for Cisco UK. "The excitement levels within Cisco are incredibly high at the moment, we are all counting down to 2012, and this really is a very unique opportunity for the firm. It's like nothing we've ever done before," he added.

One company that works well with Cisco for VoIP deployment and management solutions is VoIP Integration. They offer a number of different software products and implementation services to make Cisco IP telephony and unified communications work smoothly and efficiently. In fact, when the company works together with Cisco, it’s like watching an Olympic event – a gold medal performance in synchronized switching.