IBM and The Championships, Wimbledon, partners since 1990, have come up with new technologies ramping up the excitement of this year’s tournament in an effort to meet the digital demand and bring the fans even closer.
Celebrating 25 years of partnership with the world’s biggest tennis tournament, IBM has enhanced the mobile experience with redesigned apps by introducing a completely revamped SlamTracker analytics and an all new Social Command Centre to allow All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club (AELTC) to monitor social media conversations and have the exacts topics generating debate covered.
“We continue to look for new ways to innovate and strengthen our leadership position in the sports industry, and one of the ways we will do this is by delivering content and information about The Championships to fans in the way that they want to consume it, no matter where they are,” said Mick Desmond, commercial director at AELTC.
“Working with IBM is a winning partnership because it allows us to create a unique digital environment that delivers stats, video and information to our fans whenever they want it on all devices and is the next best thing to being there.”
The new Social Command Centre, powered by the IBM’s SoftLayer cloud technology, integrates a number of social media features, running its algorithm every 90 minutes to report on any changes, using the IBM Watson big data and analytics platform.
“The ability to ramp up from small levels of traffic to astronomical levels is done in the cloud. Our cloud sits across three data centres in North America and we use multiple data sources to provide the right level of service,” Sam Seddon, Wimbledon Client & Program Executive for IBM, said.
The stats service SlamTracker, hosted on Wimbledon.com has been completely simplified with a new interface combining historical and real-time data, and is said to be a multifaceted aspect of Wimbledon’s digital presence.
The Android, iPhone and iPad apps for fans providing live scores, news, results, photos and videos, have also been overhauled with a new interface design, along with the ability to personalize the information displayed according to the users’ interests.
