- Image by trib via Flickr
On Monday this week, IBM flew me to the Australian Open for a day at the tennis and a behind the scenes view of the technology they provide to this and other events in their role as the key technology provider. It was all done under the aegis of my being a part of the Insight 10, a small group IBM are looking to to help them understand how they, as a company, can better support and service small and growing businesses.
Of course, a day at a major sporting event, particularly one as high profile as a tennis Gran Slam, is highly enjoyable. We got to see two significant matches in the round of 16 – Verdasco vs Davydenko and Stosur vs Serena Williams. However, the ostensible point of the day was to see scope of the collaborative tools and technology that it takes to get an event like the Open up and running smoothly.
And believe me, there’s some data being crunched! Here are just a few of the highlights:
- scoring from all courts is effectively live, with governing systems to overrule anything from either the match referee’s chair or the tournament director bunker
- the same data is used to feed the web site, player and officials’ systems, match stats, television and other media as well as IBM’s Seer app that runs on Android and is built on the Wikitude engine
- it takes three fixed data centers to manage this data (they aren’t dedicated, they do other things as well)
- web site traffic, reputation and sentiment of relevant online content and energy burn are all monitored in real time and issues can be addressed should something go pear shaped
- the infrastructure is only in place for a few weeks a year, as IBM flies it all in in containers, sets up, collaborates with event tech staff, makes everything run smoothly (and smooth it is, because you just don’t notice it) and then packs up and heads off to the next event (all the tennis Grand Slams, the Tony Awards and the US Masters Golf)
- inter-team communication is dependent on time and place. Sometimes it’s face-to-face, or IM, or email or the phone. Smart. One solution is never the only solution
The five of the Insight 10 that were in Melbourne all attended the tour and were, given we probed hard enough, given the chance to ask some tough questions of the public facing web team. Given my fellow Insight 10er, Tom Worthington and I were particularly interested in issues of accessibility, we asked and were given straight answers about the standards to which the Australian Open site was developed. We particularly asked about vision impaired users and keyboard access.
While a site of the scale and dynamicism of the Open web site is no doubt a challenge to develop in such a way as to ensure the best possible of accessibility, the team assured us they looked to achieve the best possible outcome. On my testing, and that from Tom, it doesn’t appear to bear out in reality. That’s a pity, because it’s a significant blip on an otherwise excellent experience for a web site that has constant changes.
Overall, a fun and interesting experience. But obviously some significant work needs to be done to mitigate the accessibility issues of the site (and, given the same engine runs them, all the other sites IBM manages with this team).
