Caché - Helping World-Class Athletes Go for Gold

Key Benefits

  • Open structure allows easy integration
  • Rapid application development
  • Highly scalable

"You could say that our success will be measured in Olympic medals for the British team," says Dr Jonathan Odonde, network communications co-ordinator for the UK Sports Institute (UKSI).

Most IT projects these days need to show significant return on investment - but not many demand medals as well. However, Odonde has a point - the IT project in question, a “virtual sports institute” developed using Caché, InterSystems’ innovative post-relational database technology, aims to help the UK's world-class athletes achieve success on the international stage. Going for gold is not just a figure of speech here.

The UK Sports Institute, a department of UK Sport, was founded to provide the country's best sportsmen and women with the support services and facilities they need to compete and win at the highest level. UK Sport is a non-departmental government body, funded through the Exchequer and made up of a network of home country institutes and regional centres located throughout the UK. It includes a central services team co-ordinating and delivering world-class services – including IT support - to the elite sporting community.

Part of this IT support is a virtual sports institute (www.uksi.net) - an online “one stop shop”, exclusively for the use of the very best athletes, their coaches and their support teams. The site gives this elite community open access to a complete range of personalised information and applications, from nutrition or drug information database to sport specific e-learning.

"Caché allows us to deliver flexible and highly appropriate solutions
such as this one for UKSI."

- George Sirius
Managing Director
Pronoia

UKSI’s total web infrastructure has been developed by systems integrators, Pronoia, a London-based operation that specialises in Internet solutions – and makes a point of working with Caché technology from InterSystems.

Caché is a post relational database technology with a multidimensional data and application server. It features High performance SQL and multidimensional access which eliminate extra processing layers and system-level programming that would otherwise make Web development complicated and Web applications sluggish.

“The system uses Caché’s open structure to integrate with alternative technologies.”

Pronoia has been working with InterSystems’ Caché ever since the company was founded, says George Sirius, Pronoia’s managing director. “It allows us to deliver flexible and highly appropriate solutions such as this one for UKSI. We see ourselves as one of the leaders in Caché Server Pages technology.”

Global demands
Odonde explains that Web-based IT is being used increasingly to deliver the 24x7, constantly updated information athletes need to compete. "Sport is now totally global, but athletes are just not able to take their complete support team with them every time. For example, if UK athletes are competing in Auckland they may not be able to take their nutritionist, psychologist, performance analyst and so on with them."

www.uksi.net began as an ordinary Web site, but Odonde had a more ambitious vision. He knew that Web-based technology is the cheapest way to deliver information - so why not build on the existing site, making it a central port of call for athletes on any aspects of their training, performance or their lives in general? This way it would be almost as though they were taking all their personalised support vital information with them, wherever they went.

This was an innovative idea, but one that needed a web infrastructure that could support the incremental deployment of modular, functionally-independent or integrated online services or products.

“We can deliver direct Web integration through Caché Server Pages.
We don’t have to struggle.”

- George Sirius
Managing Director
Pronoia

Odonde chose Pronoia to develop this for a number of reasons. He was impressed by their experience gained in developing and supporting mission-critical business applications, and he liked the way they worked on a delivery, rather than invoice-driven approach. Last but not least, he could see that their solutions were based on a sound understanding of the technology involved.

Single Sign-on
Working closely with Odonde, Pronoia devised a modular design for the site so that it would be possible to build different levels of service as they develop. One of the main challenges was to deliver a complete range of services from various third parties which would appear seamless and totally integrated to the end-user and could be accessed via a single sign-on.

Parminder Singh, Pronoia systems development manager, takes up the story: "Single sign-on (SSO) and management services over the Internet is an industry-wide challenge. Our solution was to build a suite of applications allowing UKSI to manage its members’ data centrally and to provide a central application repository to serve as an SSO hub in a heterogeneous environment.

“The system delivered to UKSI earlier this year gives users seamless access to all authorised services on the basis of a single authentication performed when they first log-in to the portal. Available services are stored on a single application directory allowing the administrator to manage privileges and access rights for individual or grouped users. Application integration and user personalisation systems allow users to customise their experience via a personalisation module.”

The system uses Caché's open structure to integrate with alternative technologies (ASP, JSP etc.) to communicate with the UKSI.net gateway and the SSO utilising gateways such as ODBC, JDBC and XML - making it a truly open and scalable solution.

"We’ve chosen to always work with Caché as a technology decision first,
but it’s turned out to be a good business decision too."

- George Sirius
Managing Director
Pronoia

"The beauty of the modular approach is that, because Caché is platform independent, when other independent modules are added, we don't have to specify. We can deliver direct Web integration through Caché Server Pages. We don't have to struggle," says George Sirius. "Caché is the only technology that allows us to develop such flexible Web systems."

Odonde backs this up: "If we have to change our minds, it isn't a drama. It's just a case of removing a few technology layers and then we can interact directly with the database."

Sirius continues: "We've chosen to always work with Caché as a technology decision first, but it's turned out to be a good business decision too."

At the moment athletes and coaches using the Web site will mostly do so from PCs or laptops, but there are plans to enable them to use SMS and handhelds and Pronoia says it will be the one to supply the tools to manage this.

Along with the gateway, Pronoia has delivered various community systems and applications including e-surveys, a highly customisable secure web mail client, a virtual ISP registration module and a training course booking and scheduling system.

The site was deployed to world-class coaches in May 2002 and world class athletes in September 2002. Odonde is aiming at around 2,000 intensive users by next year." We're actively promoting IT-enhanced performances for the UK elite sports community," he says.