Volvo IT

A taste of France in Miami!

Posted on May 11, 2012 by admin

Blogger: Bruno Theillaumas
Location: Miami, Florida

Hi ! My name is Bruno Theillaumas and I’m from Lyon, France. This is my first Volvo Ocean Race stopover and I’m very happy to be given the opportunity to jump aboard this great adventure as new Volvo IT team member. We’re now two French guys in this team, but although the French are well known for going on strike, we have no time for this here: many challenges are just waiting for us!

Bruno working on the rooftop

I arrived in Miami on Friday, April 27^th and as Dilson already mentioned in the blog, heavy rain was awaiting us. Is this really what they call the sunny state ?

Niko working in the rain

Luckily now most of the time we have had warm sun since then, even if we face a few storms.

Pressure has been increasing over the past days as we had some difficulties securing bandwidth in the MPLS link we have been delivering between three different locations. It is used not only for the users to reach the Internet and our servers, but also for the high resolution video broadcasting traffic. Now, we have a few days for deploying a Cisco wireless bridge between the Volvo Pavilion and the main stage, and also the Mini-Link access to the TV compound which is 5km away.

Outside of the Technology control room

The Race Village looks like some genuine little village. We have a nice canteen where everybody can take a deserved break for lunch, and there’s even a school for the families working on the race and having their kids with them. I even saw a stall selling French crêpes, so a little bit of home is here !

Selling French crepes in Miami!

Talk to you !
Bruno

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bandwidth, French crepes, Miami, video broadcasting, Volvo IT, Volvo Ocean Race | Leave a comment

Welcome to Miami!

Posted on May 4, 2012 by admin

Blogger: Dilson Coelho
Location: Miami, Florida, USA

We arrived in Miami last week and it was a very difficult weekend to work since we had very heavy rain and also heavy winds.

Heavy rain in Miami!

But, we are here to deliver a solution no matter what.

New crew member, Bruno, preparing the network in the media center

And right now we have the entire cabling ready. We’ve also got the Wi-Fi prepared. We are just waiting for the local provider to deliver the Internet.

Dilson working with the race staff

I have been to Miami a couple of times. But, this time, we are discovering lots of new things. One evening after work, James and I had the chance to watch an NBA Playoff game in the AA Arena that is just beside the race village. That was an amazing experience.

Now, we need to start working on the MiniLinks and continue to support the users that are already here!

Supporting the users in the Miami media center

Cheers!
Dilson

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Miami, Miami Heat, Volvo IT, Volvo Ocean Race, Welcome to Miami | Leave a comment

Up close and personal with “Viking” trucks…

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Per Berlin

Blogger: Per Berlin
Location: In transit between Brazil and Sweden

Per Berlin

Arriving in Brazil is always a fantastic experience; people are friendly and the climate is wonderful. On the schedule for this visit was to help the rest of the crew out during the race start weekend, but also to accompany Abrao on a visit to, Dicave, a Volvo Truck dealer in Santa Catarina. We met with Douglas, the IT manager of Dicave, at the headquarters just outside Itajaí.

Abrao inside the truck dealership in Brazil

Judging from the big sign at the front and the Finnish fleet owner group inside, the Volvo Ocean Race is well utilized by truck dealers in general, and Dicave especially.

Outside of the truck dealership in Brazil

After a tour of the brand new offices and the impeccable clean workshop, we joined the Finnish customer group for a presentation of Brazil, Santa Catarina and the Dicave operation there in. Very impressive! The Dicave owner also had some of his older Volvo Viking Trucks on display, and I think Abrao got a bit nostalgic even though he wouldn’t admit it.

Abrao with the antique Volvo "Viking" Truck

We also had the opportunity to meet the Volvo IT executive management team (EMT) visiting the Itajai race village during the weekend. After pickup at the hotel, the group enjoyed a much appreciated tour of the race village and berthing pontoons (where the sailing boats were anchored).

Per with Volvo IT's management team in the Itajai race village

The management team also visited our “computer room” in the Race Office and we made a much appreciated presentation of our deliveries and the challenges we’re facing in the ports.

Volvo IT crew members Abrao and Frank in the computer room

In the meantime, our IT deliveries in Itajai have been completed and the crew is packing up to head back home. I’m in route at the moment between Itajai and Gothenburg, Sweden, looking back on another amazing experience as part of the Volvo Ocean Race!

p.s. Don’t forget that there is still time to participate in our latest Facebook challenge, where you can give us ideas on how we can track each other’s presence in real-time, while traveling with the race. Thanks to all of you that have already shared your ideas with us! We welcome more ideas; you can submit them directly on our Facebook app: http://apps.facebook.com/volvo-ocean-race/

Cheers!
Per

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Brazil, Dicave, Itajai, Santa Catarina, Volvo IT, Volvo Ocean Race, Volvo Truck dealers, Volvo Viking truck | Leave a comment

Have the winning idea to help us with “location aware travel”?

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Per Berlin

Blogger: Per Berlin
Location: Itajai, Brazil

: Per Berlin

Hi, it’s Per here. I just arrived to Itajai earlier this week to support the rest of the crew in the final days of the delivery in Brazil. It is exciting to be here; everyone is eagerly anticipating the big weekend ahead, with the in port race on Saturday and start of the next leg from Itajai to Miami on Sunday.

Today, we want to engage you with another challenge to support Volvo IT’s deliveries to the Volvo Ocean Race. This challenge is specifically related to helping us improve the way we can connect and interact with each other when we are traveling to each stop at the race.

All of us working with the race are based in a number of different locations around the world. We are each using a locally-based, corporate travel agency to manage our travel plans for flights and hotels. This means that we don’t have any easy connection into the different systems that are managing our travel plans.

So, we rely on more traditional methods to try to keep in touch while in route – phone, email, Facebook, etc. But, these methods are really ideal for one-to-one interaction and don’t give us an easy way to see where everyone is at any given time.

We’d like your help with ideas on how we can have the ability for all the crew members to see where everyone is in route in real-time and to understand if each person is on schedule to arrive when planned. We’d like to be able to use this real-time status to coordinate pick-ups and transfers upon arrival at each stop. We’d also like to have an easy way to communicate and handle changes in travel plans – with each everyone (not just one-to-one). And, finally, when we arrive at each stop, we’d also like a way to get introduced to the new location as soon as we arrive on site. This includes things like:

Understanding where nearby food stores are
Finding locations where we can buy computer parts or cables
Getting an overview of good places to eat, etc.

So, we welcome your ideas on how we can solve one or more of these challenges. It could be by recommending an existing app or online solution, giving us an idea for a completely new solution to manage this, or by sharing a tip that you, as a frequent traveler, have discovered.

You can share your ideas with us directly in the Facebook app here:
http://apps.facebook.com/volvo-ocean-race/

You have until Wednesday, April 25^th to give us your ideas!

Cheers,
Per

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Brazil, Itajai, location aware travel, travel management, travel planning, trip planning, Volvo IT, Volvo Ocean Race | Leave a comment

Anticipating big crowds in Itajai!

Posted on April 17, 2012 by admin

Blogger: Göran Vigren
Location: Itajai, Brazil

Hi, it’s Göran here from Itajai. Today CAMPER finally arrived in the port after earlier being forced to sail to Chile for repairs. Now, we only miss the Abu-Dhabi boat, which is expected to arrive by ship tomorrow.

Camper's arrival to Itajai!

We have a thrilling week in front of us with lots of events happening – the ProAm race and InPort race before the ships are taking off on their way to Miami on Sunday. The race village was crowded last weekend and the coming weekend it is expected to be one of the most visited during the whole race.

The racing boats in the Itajai harbor

The last days have been rather calm for us on the IT side and we have had the chance to have some days off for the first time since we arrived almost three weeks ago. But, from now on, it will be full speed ahead. We are just about to start launching a couple of hundred meters of fiber and putting up a new Mini-Link for a new big video screen, which is expected to arrive soon.

Yesterday, we were invited to an event after work with a samba show Rio-style. It was a great event - very nice and greatly appreciated by all of us working at the Volvo Ocean Race.

Samba event for the Volvo Ocean Race staff

Greetings from Itajai //Göran

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Abu Dhabi, Brazil, Camper, Itajai, Mini Links, Samba, Volvo IT, Volvo Ocean Race | Leave a comment

Working in a football country

Posted on April 16, 2012 by admin

Blogger: Frank Wang
Location: Itajai, Brazil

Hello, it’s Frank here. I’m very glad to blog from Brazil! For me, it’s a quite long trip from Shanghai to Itajai. I guess it took me more than 40 hours. But, it’s not affecting me to enjoy the days in Brazil at all. As my colleagues have mentioned in the previous blog posts, Itajai is a very good place, it has nice weather, friendly people, and beautiful beach. To my mind, it’s a fantastic place to stay and work.

View of Itajai, Brazil

As for my image of Brazil - it’s a kingdom of football; they have one of the first class football teams around the world. So, it could be an amazing thing if we can play football in Brazil. And, actually not only me, but also a lot of people in the Volvo Ocean Race team have the same idea. So, we arranged a football game after working. Finally a lot of people came and they are from different countries. It’s really like a warm up of the Brazilian world cup! To the end, Göran made a goals and I made a goals. We were happy, but I’m sorry I don’t remember how many goals Abrao has made, but since he is a Brazilian, it’s a normal thing for him I guess ; )

Football in Itajai!

OK, now let’s talk about work. During the last week, we have finished the microwave network mounting already. As usual, the MINILINK setup is always a challenging thing. You will never know what kind of conditions you will have. This time the big challenge is the TV compound. As you may know, the Volvo Ocean Race organization chose a high building, which is close to the port, for the TV compound this time. However, this high building hasn’t been completed yet; it’s still a construction place. So, figuring out how to carry all the stuff to the top of this 20 floors building is really tricky. But, finally the team managed that and all the microwave links are working properly. So, we are fully prepared for the in-port race now!

Preparing the microwave links

Cheers!
Frank

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Brazil, football, Itajai, Shanghai, Volvo IT, Volvo Ocean Race, world cup | Leave a comment

Warm welcome from the “Brasileiros”

Posted on April 11, 2012 by admin

Blogger: Abrão Laranjeira
Location: Itajai, Brazil

Olá! I am Abrão Laranjeira, feeling a little bit more comfortable to blog this time, once we are in Itajaí, Brazil. The city is located in Santa Catarina State on South of Brazil and has less than 200.000 habitants but with beautiful beaches and one of the most important ports of south region in Brazil and among other things, fishing is still source of wealth.

The port area in Itajai

The boat arrivals are in the Itajaí River that joins the sea exactly in the finish line of this stopover. The race also helps to emphasize an important local environmental project called “Juntos pelo Rio Itajaí” (“Together by the Itajaí River”) that focuses in keeping the rivers clean and recycling materials. The project is very similar to the “Keep the Oceans Clean” Volvo Ocean Race project.

Rescued Flip-flops sculpture

The first boats have arrived, Puma first and Telefonica approximately 14 minutes later. After the two boats started sailing in the Brazilian sea, the crews kept “line of site” of each other (…like our mini-links!) The arrival in Brazil indeed has been more exciting than it always is (according to race crew).

Puma's arrival in Itajai

The crews have had a warm welcome from the “Brasileiros” and the local organization says that more than 30.000 people have been in the race village to welcome the crews of one of the most important races in the world.

João “Joca” Signorini – The Brazilian sailor of Team Telefonica

The public could follow the boats all the time on the big screen in the Volvo Pavilion. The information from the Race Tracker coming from the boats is been sent via the Volvo IT network that uses micro-wave technology (Mini-Link) where we can have 1Gbps. The IT infrastructure has been fully used!

Até breve,
Abrão

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Brazil, Itajai, Juntos pelo Rio Itajaí, Keep the oceans clean project, Santa Catarina State, Volvo IT, Volvo Ocean Race | 10 Comments

Into the warmth…

Posted on April 4, 2012 by admin

Blogger: Göran Vigren
Location: Itajai, Brazil

Göran Vigren

Hi, it’sGöran here from Itajai, Brazil. For me, coming from Gothenburg, Sweden and used to cold rainy autumns and snowy winters, these last 6 months has been a very different experience. The Volvo Ocean Race for me has been a bit like “follow the sun concept”, but in another way that we are used to within Volvo IT. Since September last year, I have spent one month each in Alicante, Cape Town, Sanya and now Itajai. On all these sites, we have had around 20-30 degrees Celsius almost all of the time. We are able to take a swim in the Ocean now and then and it feels great to walk around in shorts and polo all days without have to think of all the usual winter stuff.

View of the Itajai coastline

Itajai is a great place to be. Friendly people, nice and warm atmosphere and nice weather even though the summer is over. The local brasileiros have been very helpful and made their most to help solve the issues that have come across.

A view of the port in Itajai

We have installed a completely new LAN infrastructure, including all cabling and Wireless LAN for the Volvo Ocean Race office and Media-center in the exhibition center in the port. The last days more and more people have arrived – both Volvo personnel and media people, so it´s crucial that everything works as it is supposed to this close to the opening of the Itajai Race village on Wednesday at 2:00 PM local time.

Working with the IT implementation in Itajai

In the coming days, we will concentrate our efforts in establish MiniLinks for the TV broadcasts to the Volvo Pavilion and the TV “compound “ which are situated in a 20-floors building which are under construction just outside the Race village.

Volvo pavilion in Itajai

I think this will be a really great stopover for the Volvo Ocean Race, and look forward to the coming events.

See you soon //Göran

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Brazil, Itajai, LAN Infrastructure, Volvo, Volvo IT, Volvo Ocean Race, Wireless LAN | Leave a comment

Back on track in Brazil

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Victor Wibom

Blogger: Victor Wibom
Location: Itajaí, Brazil

Victor Wibom

Once again we are back on track, this time in Itajaí, Brazil. Greeting us with wonderful weather, views and a visit to our colleague Abrão at the Volvo site in Curitiba some 200 kilometers northeast of here, we have started the work with the IT deliveries for this stopover.

As Per is mentioning in his previous blog, the layout of the port makes the mission to deliver our IT platform seem rather straightforward. However, this might change from one minute to another depending on the prerequisites in the port. For example, a seemingly simple change of location for a printer or video screen would probably mean that we need to make sure that we even have a power plug in the new location, and then make sure to cable the location from the nearest switch.

On top of building the network infrastructure in the offices we at the same time have to plan for and carry out the rest of the infrastructure throughout the port, making sure that we will be able to deliver the high definition broadcasts with microwave antennas. This includes finding a suitable location and mounting for each antenna, other than the actual work mounting and aligning them.

To summarize, the main and probably most critical task in each port is to quickly adapt your mindset and get a good overview of the prerequisites – everything from local standards to what the buildings and other infrastructure looks like.
In Itajaí for example, the offices and Media Center are located in an exhibition center which means that we are building a custom made landscape in one of the halls where everything down to a power plug needs to be specifically requested – and as you all know, there is no ethernet without electricity which makes it crucial to have everything and everyone in the right place at the right time.

Até-logo!
Victor

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Brazil, Curitiba, Itajai, Volvo IT | Leave a comment

Halftime Report

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Per Berlin

Blogger: Per Berlin
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden

Per Berlin

A couple of days ago we closed the port in Auckland, and yesterday the red team, (Victor, Abrao, Frank and Göran), started the setup in Itajaí, in the southern part of Brazil. When you think back on the ports we’ve visited, it’s funny to realize that planning sometimes differs quite a lot from reality.

Per at the start of the race in Alicante

For example, we thought that Cape Town and Auckland would be hard to pull-off, while Abu Dhabi could potentially be easier. When in fact it was the other way around. Well, calling Cape Town easy could possibly be an understatement, but it was not as hard as we thought it would be.

Sure, we mounted a lot of Microwave links, and it was right in the waterfront of the city. But the again; we had really good support by the port organization, enabling us to get all the good mount points we needed. For Auckland, the picture was a little bit different; here the complication was a daring 5km jump over water with heavy traffic.

Mounting the solution in Auckland

Again; this went surprisingly well much thanks to good collaboration between port organization, telecom operators, TV channels and the guys responsible for technology within the Volvo Ocean Race.

The Itajaí stopover is again located at the waterfront, downtown. But, the big difference is that the race village is fairly compact, without any major roads crossing the area. Judging from this it will be a rather straight forward … On second thoughts; get me get back to you on this once we got things up and humming.

No matter the amount of planning you do, when it comes down to make things happen, it’s still the people involved that is the critical success factor. We couldn’t be better off than with the guys onboard for this version of the race.

It takes a lot of dedication to work long days, building a port and solving problems, and at the same time responding to any support request with a smile and a “no problem”. Hats off for the Volvo IT crew!

/perb

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Auckland, Ericsson Mini-Links, Itajai, Volvo IT, Volvo Ocean Race | Leave a comment

A taste of France in Miami!

Welcome to Miami!

Up close and personal with “Viking” trucks…

Have the winning idea to help us with “location aware travel”?

Anticipating big crowds in Itajai!

Working in a football country

Warm welcome from the “Brasileiros”

Into the warmth…

Back on track in Brazil

Halftime Report

Volvo IT blog – Volvo Ocean Race

Compete and help the Volvo IT Crew!

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