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Rapid Deployment: IT at Cirque du Soleil

By Alice Dragoon

November 01, 2002 — CIO — The midsummer sun beats down on an East Boston parking lot?a vast stretch of asphalt dotted with trailers and Porto Potties and surrounded by a chain-link fence. A small fleet of Bobcats darts about, pounding a giant circle of metal stakes into the expanse of tar. The ring foreshadows the huge blue and gold big top that will host Quidam, one of Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil’s five traveling shows that feature artists performing extraordinary physical feats along with music, costumes and characters that make ordinary circuses seem downright pedestrian.

While the big top will dominate the village of tents and trailers that will spring to life during the next eight days, the success of the Boston engagement of Quidam requires that a complex IT infrastructure spring to life as well. The man responsible for making that happen is Jean-Pierre Fontaine. Although the performers and most staffers get a week’s vacation between cities, the demands of rapidly moving IT from one city to the next sometimes mean Fontaine, North American tour computer and telecom coordinator, goes nearly three weeks without a day off. After tearing down the Detroit production at 10 p.m. on the previous Sunday and spending all day Monday driving to Boston, Fontaine was onsite by 8 a.m on Tuesday, getting a head start on the IT setup for the next show. Thanks to a recent overhaul of the IT infrastructure supporting Cirque’s tours, he can get the job done well within the eight-day setup window before the Boston premiere.

A Banker Joins the Circus

Danielle Savoie, Cirque du Soleil’s first-ever vice president of IT, perches on a folding chair in the IT trailer in Boston and reflects on the changes she’s instituted since joining the circus in April 2000. A review of tour IT (the systems that support the business operations) in 2001 revealed that each tour’s infrastructure was unique, she says, "like little different islands." Savoie wanted to standardize and streamline the IT supporting the tours with the goal of simplifying and shortening the set-up and tear-down processes. "IT is the last thing to leave a site and the first to be in production at the next location," she says. "It’s on the critical path to be ready for the premiere [in each city]."

Having managed projects that reengineered all branch processes and technology for Desjardins, the largest credit union in Quebec, Savoie was well acquainted with the challenges of efficiently supporting multiple remote operations. Cirque du Soleil offered the additional challenge of mobility. "In a standard company, the Pittsburgh branch is probably still going to be in Pittsburgh next year," she says. "At Cirque, we have five tours on the road, and they move every two months."

 

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