Interoute announces three year ICT infrastructure and hosting partnership with UEFA

Europe’s largest cloud service provider to support UEFA’s entire business operations and online presence for next three seasons

London on 27 September 2011

Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), the governing body of football in Europe, has selected Interoute’s pan-European cloud services to support all its business, football competitions and events over the next three seasons. Interoute will host all applications and systems used directly by UEFA including its Football Administration and Management Environment (FAME) and the UEFA.com website.

UEFA’s Football Administration and Management Environment is its core IT platform running the services essential to UEFA, such as media bookings, accreditations, competition management, as well as services for referees and commercial partners. This is a unique application crafted for the specific needs of a sport’s governing body and is crucial for its operations during matches. At the same time UEFA also requires a platform that caters for huge numbers of visitors viewing videos and images on UEFA.com. UEFA’s competitions place substantial demands on UEFA’s online platform where more than 400 million users are expected to visit the UEFA.com website compared to some 270 million when the last EURO final tournament was held in 2008.

Daniel Marion, Head of Information and Communications Technology at UEFA, said: “Interoute has successfully designed, built and deployed a platform that delivers both enterprise grade stability and reliability as well as event-driven scalability. UEFA.com is one of the top ten most visited sites in the world during major football events providing high quality match coverage to football fans around the world. In Interoute we have found a partner who can match the high levels of performance and quality that UEFA and its competitions stand for.”

Gareth Williams, CEO at Interoute, said: “It is a huge endorsement of the quality of Interoute’s organisation, infrastructure and technical expertise that UEFA will rely on it to bring all the latest competition results and information to fans around the world, as well as underpinning online ticket sales and organisational applications. With the public-facing IT behind Europe’s most prestigious football being hosted in Europe’s largest private cloud, fans can expect a great experience from every click as well as every match.”

Interoute’s Unified ICT portfolio comprises computing, connectivity and communications. Its Unified Connectivity offering has proven attractive to organisations looking for a scalable, secure and unconstrained platform on which they can build their Enterprise applications, web presence and communication services.

About UEFA

UEFA (Union des Associations Européennes de Football) is the governing body of European football. UEFA’s political structure is a representative democracy based on 53 member associations which is supported by 19 specialised committees that shape UEFA policies on issues such as national team competitions, refereeing and club licensing. As a not-for-profit organisation, it redistributes income into football development, supporting its mission to promote and protect European football at every level of the game. http://www.uefa.com/

About Interoute

Interoute Communications Ltd is the owner operator of Europe’s largest cloud services platform, which encompasses over 60,000 km of lit fibre, 8 hosting data centres and 32 collocation centres, with connections to 140 additional third-party data centres across Europe. Its full-service Unified ICT platform serves international enterprises, as well as every major European telecommunications incumbent and the major operators of North America, East and South Asia, governments and universities. These organisations find Interoute the ideal partner for computing, connectivity and communications and eveloping new services. Its Unified ICT strategy has proved attractive to enterprises looking for a scalable, secure and unconstrained platform on which they can build their voice, video, computing and data services, as well as service providers in need of high capacity international data transit and infrastructure. With established operations throughout mainland Europe, North America and Dubai, Interoute also owns and operates dense city networks throughout Europe’s major business centres. www.interoute.com