IBM has been the official technology supplier and consultant to the Wimbledon championships for the last 24 years. For two weeks every summer about 450,000 people attend the tournament as well as an additional 386 million global audience. For IBM, it’s an excellent opportunity to showcase their different products for social, analytics and cloud.
IBM Slam Tracker
IBM Slam Tracker is an online live presentation of current and predictive analytics of live matches. For years they have had a live tracker that showed the point score. This year’s version capitalizes on predictive analytics, providing fans with key the stats on player performance and player strengths during the game. They also have integrated a social element, allowing fans to engage with the game.
IBM Content Analytics
IBM analyses the fan sentiment on twitter and combines this with player performance to provide fans with a leaderboard that shows a combined score for players. On site at Wimbledon, they are using 3-D printer to produce a trophy for these leaders.
IBM Smart Cloud
IBM Smart Cloud is used as the infrastructure to host the Wimbledon website and to support the Mobile Apps. Using the cloud allows Wimbledon to scale up during the championship season, and scale back otherwise. Concerns for the website include, scalability, security, responsiveness and availability.
Parallels for Business
The lesson for business is to incorporate similar technologies to support business, whether we do so from IBM or other vendors. Identifying and tracking key performance indicators can help with predicting revenue opportunities and improving the engagement with customers. Marketing tea marketing and service teams today need a way to analyse social sentiment about the company and its products. Cloud services can support business processes in a scalable and secure method, and allow companies to focus on doing business.
In Sport, like business, outcomes are not guaranteed, all you can do is be as prepared as you can to perform your best on the day and roll with the outcome. It’s been an interesting tournament with a large number of high numbered seeds going down in the first week. In the words of Rafa Nadal, at the press conference after his shock 1st win loss – “… sometimes you play well and you have the chance to win. Sometimes you play worst and the opponent play well and you lose”. Great perspective, given the millions in prize money at the tournament!
Enjoy the weekend! Enjoy the tennis!
