On Saturday 1 July 2017, the 104th edition of the Tour de France stages its “Grand Départ” from Düsseldorf, Nord-Rhine Westphalia; two days later, on Monday 3 July, it hits Luxembourg!

Starting from Verviers in the Belgian Ardennes, the route of 212.5 km wends its way through the west side of Luxembourg from Troisvierges in the north and taking in, among other places, the two towns of Esch (-sur-Sûre and -sur-Alzette),  before finishing in the French border town of Longwy. Stage 4 then departs Mondorf les Bains the following morning and crosses into France at Schengen before the riders make their way down to Vittel, in the Vosges.

Over the course of its history, The Tour has constantly been at the forefront of innovative communication. It was launched in 1903 as a means to boost sales of the newspaper “L’Auto” and progressively introduced cinema, live radio and live TV to expand its coverage.

Since 2015 though, there has been a huge investment in digital content to allow avid tour followers to drill down in the most incredible detail into individual rider performance … GoPro helmet cams, new television graphics of race data, race data shared on social media channels, real time readouts of rider’s speed, position, both geographically and in the race and many more metrics adding up to hundreds of millions of individual pieces of information over the course of The Tour. Last year this digital content was embraced on a huge scale, with 1.4 million app downloads, 6 million social media fans, 36 million separate website visits and 55 million video views across 5 video sharing platforms. In terms of a digital transformation of an event, these are compelling figures indeed, and ones which should make organisers of other global events, such as Formula 1, sit up and take notice.

The technology behind all of this was brought to life in record time by global IT services company Dimension Data. Their original contact with organisers ASO (Amaury Sport Organisation), occurred in January 2015 and the technical scope was defined by the end of March. In June they ran their first full scale beta test during the Critérium du Dauphiné, and they were ready to go live in time for the Grand Départ of the Tour de France at the beginning of July 2015. This rapid development was achieved significantly because of Dimension Data’s ability to leverage many of the IT industry’s most current technologies including Big Data, Internet of Things, Hybrid IT and Cloud in a global development, testing and implementation effort spanning several continents.

Visitors to the Dimension Data Client Experience Centre, which will follow The Tour, will get the opportunity to learn at first hand how and why these latest IT innovations were used before getting the opportunity to seeing them in action during a full day of The Tour and to understand for themselves how, as Patrice Cheret, Networking and Digital Space Lead for Dimension Data said “The Tour de France is a perfect example of the digital transformation of a company business”.

If you’re a cycling fan then you too will be able to gain the full immersive experience through the official Tour de France app and experience for yourself how digital transformation is reshaping the world of tomorrow, and, even more importantly, the world of today.

Photo by John Chalmers: Development milestones with Patrice Cheret