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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'?

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.