Summer's here: time for Wimbledon, strawberries and cream... and IT

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    The start of the Wimbledon Championships is an exciting time for tennis fans, as well as an opportunity for casual observers to brush up on their knowledge of net cords and line calls.

    IBM is to the fore this year as it celebrates 25 years of sponsoring the event. Earlier this week, ZDNet dropped in — not only to sample some tennis, but also to check out the technology behind the online coverage. I last wrote about the IT in use at Wimbledon eight years ago , so it was good to see what had changed. 

    Pictured above is 'Henman Hill', named after the UK's Tim Henman, famous for never quite making it to the final (attempts have been made to rename it Murray Mount, but whether the plucky Englishman or the successful Scotsman will prevail remains unclear).

    Images  ZDNet/Colin Barker

    Caption by: Colin Barker

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    The press centre was the first change I noticed. It's shown here — sort of, since it's actually buried beneath Court No. 1. Burying a press centre might seem an expensive option, but space at the relatively small Wimbledon site has always been at a premium.

    Caption by: Colin Barker

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    Once inside the press office you can see one of the biggest technology changes in the last eight years. Gone are the bulky CRTs, to be replaced by flat-screen TVs — lots and lots of them.

    However, just like eight years ago, the IBM team is housed in just two moderate-sized rooms. One is devoted to the core systems for displaying the mass of information on players, their performances and so on, as well as the scores and rankings.

    The second room is devoted to feeding information to the internet and the phone network via SlamTracker, the core IBM application for the Championships. SlamTracker enables anyone to keep a close eye on events at the championships from anywhere in the world.

    And I do mean 'the world' because, according to IBM, more than half of the internet traffic generated by Wimbledon comes from outside the UK.

    Caption by: Colin Barker

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    Thanks to the technology, it's now possible to watch the play on all 12 of the show courts at the same time. My visit was on the second day of the championships and, as you can see, all of the show courts were busy.

    Caption by: Colin Barker

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    The technology has improved so much that it's possible to monitor every shot in every game, and then to analyse every detail of the play. How many backhand shots, how many forehand, how many lobs, how many underhand shots, and so on.

    A dream for tennis coaches and players, SlamTracker can give you all of the tennis info you need, and more.

    Caption by: Colin Barker

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    Halfway though the second day of the championships, the Wimbledon website has logged almost 2 million unique users and over 33 million page views. At this rate, the record set last year should be comfortably beaten.

    But the most interesting statistics are for iPhone, Android and iPad app installs, which are on course to dwarf the 2013 figures.

    Caption by: Colin Barker

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    This messy-looking screen is a full view of one game, showing all the statistics as they happened. Overkill, you may think — but players, coaches and fans no doubt devour this information. Hopefully they know what it all means.

    Caption by: Colin Barker

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    IBM's pride and joy, the Watson supercomputer obviously had to muscle in somewhere, and here it is. A relatively small portion of its computing power was being used to run a website traffic prediction model. As you can see from the left-hand side of the graph, the predicted and observed traffic levels match very closely.

    Caption by: Colin Barker

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    This appears to be a bit of a power waste: a stack of Lenovo laptops with their lids half-open and the screens on. How about opening up Control Panel | Power Options and selecting 'Do nothing' under 'When I close the lid'?

    Caption by: Colin Barker

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    I don't know if you have to be tall to be a tennis player, but it must surely help with some aspects of the game. Here, walking away from the camera, is one of the players, whom I judged to be around six foot seven (2 metres). Spend any time at Wimbledon and you'll encounter some extremely tall men and women.

    Caption by: Colin Barker

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This year IBM celebrates 25 years of partnership with the world's most famous tennis championships. We go behind the scenes to examine the tech that serves up the online coverage.

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The start of the Wimbledon Championships is an exciting time for tennis fans, as well as an opportunity for casual observers to brush up on their knowledge of net cords and line calls.

IBM is to the fore this year as it celebrates 25 years of sponsoring the event. Earlier this week, ZDNet dropped in — not only to sample some tennis, but also to check out the technology behind the online coverage. I last wrote about the IT in use at Wimbledon eight years ago , so it was good to see what had changed. 

Pictured above is 'Henman Hill', named after the UK's Tim Henman, famous for never quite making it to the final (attempts have been made to rename it Murray Mount, but whether the plucky Englishman or the successful Scotsman will prevail remains unclear).

Images  ZDNet/Colin Barker

Caption by: Colin Barker

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