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Digital Platforms Reign At The 2014 US Open

IBM

By Elizabeth O'Brien, Worldwide Sponsorship Marketing Leader, IBM

It’s the end of summer in New York, and that means it’s time for the US Open, complete with epic contests between the world’s top tennis players, and a legion of stats, analysis and data visualizations designed to help fans better understand and engage with the action.

Rafael Nadal may not be here to defend his 2013 title, but Novak Djokovic and the rest of the men's field will be eager to raise the championship trophy on Sept. 8. Will Serena William regain her Grand Slam mojo as she defends her title? Simona Halep, #47 last year is now #2 and has her eye on her first Slam victory. Fireworks are guaranteed.

As the largest annually attended sporting event in the world with 700,000 attendees, the US Open is a showcase not only for premier tennis, but also for IBM’s advanced analytics, cloud and mobile technologies. Each year, we work with the United States Tennis Association to redefine "spectacular" both on the grounds at the US Open and on the digital platforms that bring the action to fans around the world.

This year we’re upping the ante with new solutions and added features in analytics, cloud, mobile and social computing that will help to bring millions of US Open fans even closer to the heart of the action. The combination of technologies that IBM is serving up creates robust content and insight through predictive, real-time and historical match insights, interactive graphics, and, of course, live videos with data overlays and analysis of social media conversations that flow continuously during the two weeks of the tournament.

Data analysis and visualization is at the heart of our innovation at this year’s tournament. In particular, we’ve re-imagined how fans experience the matches. We’ve added new interactive and intuitive graphics to help fans follow the action more easily, identifying and analyzing the variables that affect players' performance, and highlighting match stats to explain outcomes in points, games and matches.

This visual approach is bound to make the already popular IBM SlamTracker analytics tool even more compelling. SlamTracker brings the matches to life, going beyond dishing up scores to analyzing real time and historical player, match and tournament data. This year, we’ve redesigned SlamTracker to feature point-by-point visual analysis that adds context to the on court action. For example, if Roger Federer serves an ace, a graphic may appear showing how many aces he served per set in that match so far versus the aces of his opponent.

We’re expanding match analytics by adding new data sets -- player and ball tracking -- to SlamTracker. Its analysis will now incorporate the impact that ball placement and player movement has on the action. We will also know how far players run in their matches. In the past we have tracked players’ on-court time through the tournament; adding player movement data to this will give fans a better indication of players’ potential stamina as they progress through the rounds.

All the US Open digital platforms are powered by IBM cloud technology. The data analytics that drive insights for fans also manage the infrastructure of the cloud. In the past, as we saw surges in traffic on the web site and mobile platforms, we manually increased capacity on the cloud. Now, we are using Watson Foundations technologies to automatically predict, manage and respond to traffic spikes. By analyzing data such as social sentiment volume, draw schedules, historic traffic, and player popularity the technology automatically recognizes the need to scale capacity up and down for the USOpen.org web site and mobile apps and it acts accordingly.

The tasks these technologies are tackling at the US Open -- helping us virtually dive into play on the courts, sifting through data to give us perspectives we never would have considered before, and helping us share our experiences globally, all supported by a reliable and flexible infrastructure -- are the same tasks that IBM addresses every day for businesses across industries around the world. Just as analytics, cloud, mobile and social technologies are transforming how we experience the US Open, they’re changing the business of business.

Every year since 1992, the USTA and IBM have worked together to improve tennis fans' experience at the US Open. These two weeks are an opportunity to celebrate amazing athletes who always seem to raise their level of play under the New York skyline. We provide continuous innovation and the best in technology so that fans worldwide can enjoy every aspect of the action.

To learn more, visit ibm.com/cloud or join the conversation at #ibmcloud.

Elizabeth O'Brien is the  Worldwide Sponsorship Marketing Leader for IBM.