Under special conditions, and despite a postponed start due to the weather, this is it! On Wednesday, April 27, at 9:30 p.m., the first patrols set off in the mythical military ski-mountaineering race in the high mountains.
A human and technological challenge
MSO, who entrusted us with the redesign of their platform mso.swiss, was in charge of the timekeeping for this 2022 edition, a challenge of utmost complexity. Via their blog here, discover how MSO collaborated with the Patrouille des Glaciers command, the Swiss Army, and Swisscom to take up the challenge of qualitative monitoring of the participants and their results.
This winter’s low snowfall prompted the organizers to do everything possible to ensure safety and minimize the risks for the patrollers. To this end, more than 1,600 military and civilian personnel were mobilized to organize and accompany the participants, guaranteeing a worry-free outcome.
To ensure optimal connectivity and reliability for real-time monitoring of the patrols, Swisscom installed a temporary 4G mobile network along the entire route.
Connectivity in these extreme conditions was therefore a crucial challenge not only for the timing with MSO but also to guarantee safety, to accomplish this an excellent coordination of the different organizers and the Major State of the Swiss Army telecom specialists was necessary.
A mythical path
The 2 historical routes, the first one of 57,5 kilometers starting from Zermatt and the other one of 29,6 kilometers starting from Arolla, are covered in patrol teams of 3 competitors.
This year more than 4500 participants of 35 nationalities decided to take up the challenge and join the glory of this true institution of mountain sports.
3D view of the complete track – Swisstopo.ch – La Patrouille des Glaciers © copyright 2022
MSO & Apptitude on Microsoft.com
Our collaboration with MSO was the subject of a case study published in Microsoft’s Customer Stories that highlight the technical and ergonomic challenges encountered and the solutions provided by Apptitude, Silicom Group, and Azure Cloud Services.
The transition from the old system to the new platform had to be done without any degradation of the user experience while allowing thousands of users to register and view the results of different races simultaneously.
Discover this full case study in microsoft.com
Learn more about La Patrouille des Glaciers
Discover the officiel website of La Patrouille des Glaciers here.
Find out more about the competition on the MSO platform.