Love – 30: IBM and Wimbledon celebrate 30 years of Technical Partnership and Innovation

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With the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet club readying themselves to open the doors for Wimbledon 2019 on July 1^st, IBM will be celebrating a three-decade partnership of technological innovation with the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament. Both parties are busy preparing themselves to serve up the best fan engagement experience to date, powered by the speed, scalability and innovation of the IBM Cloud. Wimbledon thinks and operates as a data driven media business so it’s never been more important to have the right cloud partner supporting them.

Since 1990 IBM have captured 62,814,711 data points. However, each year Wimbledon’s data flows become more complex, requiring cutting edge, robust technology to underpin the continually evolving vision to provide fans with the best engagement experience pre, during and post tournament.

IBM uses a true hybrid cloud model to bring Wimbledon to life. The All England Tennis Club uses on-premise systems for publishing, scoring and video encoding. Private clouds provide the trust and security to manage the entire tech landscape and finally the public clouds’ speed and scalability is leveraged to serve up the fans’ digital experience no matter what the demand.

A hybrid, globally dispersed and highly available environment, deployed across multiple availability zones, provides the scale, security, reliability and confidence when Wimbledon needs it the most. Wimbledon’s infrastructure and systems scale up to 55,000% compared to a typical day outside of The Championship so the flexibility of the IBM Cloud is perfectly placed to ace the requirement come July each year.

Over the years Wimbledon have adopted an open approach to cloud, leveraging open standards and open source tooling, meaning their systems are more elastic, allowing data and applications to be easily portable across their hybrid environment in order to meet demand. The synergy between this and IBM’s approach to open standards allows Wimbledon to benefit from the use of standard container images and Kubernetes for related content, providing an even more seamless digital platform.

Similarly, to meet extreme scalability challenges The Weather Company reengineered its entire web platform around IBM Cloud, to scale and meet demand as fast as the weather happens.  IBM uses the Weather company API to pull the most accurate weather data into Wimbledon.com.

IBM have worked with Wimbledon to design and deliver differentiated and personalised digital experiences to the world’s media, players and fans. Wimbledon.com and associated apps provide the gateway to the Wimbledon brand which served real-time insights across 49.5M digital visits in 2018 alone. 2019 will see the MyWimbledon guest experience program expanded to provide more personalised experiences to Debenture holders and fans alike. This ties in with Wimbledon’s vision of ‘digital convergence’ providing a single, unique experience to all stakeholders via Wimbledon.com.

By using the IBM Cloud, Wimbledon are able to rapidly innovate with new digital experiences and apps like the Player Website, safe in the knowledge that their infrastructure and architecture is robust, flexible and secure enough to handle whatever digital traffic getting volleyed its way. In addition to that the portability provided by an ‘open’ approach means workloads can be quickly and safely moved between environments, placing them in the best location for optimal access and performance enabling the best fan experience possible.

There are three main areas that continue to cement Wimbledon’s partnership with IBM:

• Innovative technology: Using the latest AI and Cloud technologies to deliver award winning digital experiences.
• Industry expertise: Sports and media expertise to understand, attract and grow a global audience of millions in a highly competitive landscape.
• Trust & Security: A responsible partner trusted to deliver and secure the digital gateway to Wimbledon’s most valued asset, their brand. No other cloud provider has such a comprehensive set of tools and apps focused on securing your data.

These three vital areas are not only the reason why Wimbledon chose, and continue to work with IBM, but also why hundreds of other businesses world-wide use and trust IBM and the IBM Cloud. A hybrid cloud environment improves operational speed and performance, workload scalability, security and stability to meet huge flux in demand.

For the chance to learn more Wimbledon and IBM related information and how other businesses are driving innovation through the IBM Cloud check out this page:

https://www.ibm.com/wimbledon

So, when it comes to Wimbledon this year, whether you’re checking who’s up next on Centre Court or watching highlights from the days play created using IBM Cloud AI analysis of crowd sentiment and player gestures, you will be benefitting from IBM’s long-standing partnership with Wimbledon – two worldwide brands united in their pursuit of greatness.