UPDATED 14:50 EDT / JUNE 30 2014

Life is like a tennis match; IBM brings mobile and analytics muscle to Wimbledon experience

Alize_Cornet_Beats_Serina_WIlliams_at_Wimbledon_2014Before I got out of bed this morning I checked the latest scores from Wimbledon on my smart phone and also listened to the match between French star Alize Cornet, who defeated number 1 seed Serena Williams on Friday, and Canadian Eugenie Bouchard. Later I checked the statistical analysis for the match between Andy Murray and Kevin Anderson in Slam Tracker on the Wimbledon site and monitored live analysis of their performance on my Windows tablet while listening to the end of the match.

IBM is giving an expected 19 million-plus fans around the world the next best thing to courtside seats for this year’s Wimbledon with live video and audio of matches, ESPN color commentary from a team including Chris Everett, John McEnroe and Pam Shriver, as well as sophisticated Big Data analysis of the statistics. Users can customize the app (available for iOS and Android) to follow their favorite players or see the entire field with a single button click.

Data analysis is impacting tennis and sports in general, and the players are experiencing that fact first hand. Data guides their match strategy, said Williams at last year’s IBM Information on Demand (IoD) conference. “Knowing my opponent’s data, her percentages through the year, where she likes to hit her forehand for serve returns, for instance, really helps.” When Serena started her professional career very little data was available, and she relied on watching her opponent’s matches. She still watches recordings, but the data analysis provides extra insights. “I like to watch and see what I did well, what I didn’t do well, what I can improve on. But I love the new idea of adding data to know my opponent better without having to just study film all day.” 

“Tennis in an English garden”

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View of the Hill and Court 19 at Wimbledon

View of the Hill and Court 19 at Wimbledon

The Web site was redesigned this year to give users the feel of “tennis in an English garden” with grass courts, said John Kent, Program Manager, IBM Worldwide Sponsorship Marketing. This year IBM is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its partnership with the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (AELTCC), the organization behind Wimbledon. “Over the last couple of years, we’ve done a lot of work reimagining the Wimbledon experience and bringing it more in line with the Wimbledon brand” he said. The visual properties of the website and applications present the beauty, history and tradition of Wimbledon.

IBM is the market leader in revenue from Big Data according to the most recent market study by Wikibon Principal Research Contributor Jeff Kelly. That’s why Wimbledon’s needs fit IBM’s strengths.

“Tennis is a fairly data-rich sport, and data is an important element in what we are doing as a company,” Kent says. When a match starts, the Keys to the Match dashboard displays three performance targets for each player based on analysis of the last eight years of Grand Slam tennis, about 41 million data points. For example, when Roger Federer takes the court it might say “Federer needs to win more than 36 percent of his first serves.” Throughout the match the dashboard graphs each player’s performance in real time against those goals.

The enhanced SlamTracker provides live data on each match as it happens, including real-time scores and “point commentary” that describes key shots. It also provides near real-time “Stage Items,” which is insight based on each point. Intended for fans, it is also used by the TV commentators.

The Associations’ View

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Slam Tracker from Wimbledon match

Slam Tracker from Wimbledon match

Services that involve fans more closely in the action are important for the associations that stage events. These are their big money makers for the year and the site and mobile apps attract international audiences and help sell tickets and merchandise. For example, the U.S. Open, which takes place August 25-September 8, helps the U.S. Tennis Association “build new courts and put rackets on those courts,” said Nicole Jeter West, Director of Digital Strategy for the US Open, in a talk at IoD.

While thousands of people attend in person, millions worldwide follow the events on TV and online. “We have fans watching across the globe from the Philippines to Thailand to India to Africa,” West said. The Grand Slams are premier world class, luxury experiences, and it’s important that the online experience project that. That’s why planning takes place year-round for a two-week tournament.

The events are also important for IBM because cloud computing and Big Data are vital to the future of the century-old tech company. “Wimbledon as a client has a lot of the same challenges our other clients have,” said Kent. IBM uses SPSS and other analytic tools to provide the advanced services on the site. The Grand Slams are real-life demonstrations of what it can do for its less public clients.

The technologies and user expectations for the Grand Slams have evolved rapidly. In 2013, more people accessed the U.S. Open via mobile devices than on laptops and desktops for the first time. The same trend is driving businesses to reach customers through mobile platforms.

“Why does this matter to your business?” asked West. “Clearly, the predictive analytics, the infrastructure and all those things behind it could easily help your business win as well.”

Behind the scenes

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Serena WIlliams serving at Wimbledon

Serena WIlliams serving at Wimbledon

Behind the scenes, IBM uses Big Insights for Streams from the Watson Foundation to forecast online traffic for each match based on live social media activity. Many businesses and cloud providers have to deal with uncertainty, said IBM Software Engineer and Master Inventor Brian O’Connell, who heads IBM’s cloud team for sporting events, in an interview at IoD 2013. ”But for us focused on live sports, every day is uncertain.” The infrastructure has to withstand record-breaking spikes in activity that can be hard to predict.

That lets IBM allocate resources to support Web and mobile traffic dynamically, saving a great deal of money over reserving resources for the entire two-week event based on the maximum expected traffic. This starts with historical data analysis of traffic on the Web site and mobile platforms over the last several years to provide a baseline. A star like Rafael Nadal will draw large virtual crowds when he takes the court, but the unexpected can always happen. This year at Wimbledon, for instance, Nadal, seeded 2nd, had dramatic matches in his first three rounds, dropping the first set in each before winning in see-saw battles. That may draw larger-than-usual virtual crowds to his matches.

To anticipate and react to that unpredictability, IBM has built what it calls the “Predictive Cloud” around real-time analytics of Twitter trends, topics and conversations. An unexpected spike in tweets about a player before a match “tells us something has happened,” says O’Connell. “We don’t know what happened, but it means we should expect a major spike in traffic around the match.” This information also influences live TV coverage of the player, both on and off court.

All of this runs on a private network with three geographically dispersed data centers that host the Grand Slams, the Master’s, U.S. Open Golf and IBM.com. They provide faster response time to different geographies, share the load and act as live backup for each other, so if IBM loses an entire data center to a regional disaster, the other two can handle the full load.

Rufus the Harris Hawk at Wimbledon

Rufus the Harris Hawk at Wimbledon

Personal Perspective

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I started last week a tennis neophyte, only trying out the Web site and Android app as research and because this is a rare opportunity for me to use the technology I write about. Five days in I am hooked, planning my days around specific matches. I have already put the dates for the U.S. Open in my schedule.

Alize Cornet photo by Jon Buckle/AELTC 
Court 19 and the Hill photo by Bob Martin/AELTC
Slam Tracker courtesy IBM Corp.
Serena Williams photo by Chris Raphael/AELTC 
Rufus the Hawk photo by Jon Buckle/AELTC

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