Tata Communications on Thursday announced a multi-year technology service and marketing agreement with Formula One Management.
The agreement will see Tata Communications delivering connectivity to all 20 Formula 1 race locations over its global network. It will also provide hosting and content delivery services to Formula1.com
IT infrastructure
Formula One group businesses and race locations will now be connected to the Tata Global Network, supported by secure MPLS connectivity. Formula One Management's IT infrastructure and Formula1.com will be co-located and hosted in Tata Communications' data centres.
Mr Vinod Kumar, Managing Director and CEO of Tata Communications, said, “Formula 1 requires fast and secure connectivity, because even a split second of downtime can have huge repercussions for its business, brand and reputation.”
Mr Bernie Ecclestone, CEO of Formula One group, said, “Connectivity and content delivery are critical issues for Formula 1. This is a collaboration that will help us stay at the technological cutting edge in these categories.”
Tata Communications' capabilities in video and content delivery networks will enable uninterrupted, high-quality connectivity to the multi-media portal on Formula1.com. The site gets on average four million unique visits per weekend, peaking at seven million over some events.
The company has Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific data transfer capacity of one terabit per second. The infrastructure will enable the sport's official Web site to instantly scale up to cope with these significant and sometimes unpredictable traffic spikes, the company said.
Security suite
Tata Communications will also provide Formula1.com with a new Managed Security Suite and will apply an additional layer of managed security monitoring to ensure an increased level of protection to Formula One Management's IT infrastructure.
Going forward, the two companies will also work in close collaboration on research and development around connectivity and the latest video technologies.