It's cloudy at Wimbledon
One truly amazing aspect of Wimbledon is that a few weeks prior to the event, much of the infrastructure vital to making it happen is nowhere to be seen. For 50 weeks of the year, Wimbledon acts as a private tennis club with fewer than 500 members. Come June, IBM helps it to scale up its infrastructure to meet the demands of a global audience for a critical two-week period and then scale back down to support normal operations once it's all over.
The Wimbledon cloud
IBM is the Official Information Technology Supplier and Consultant to The Championships and has been developing and managing IT systems for the Club and The Championships since 1990. By handing the hosting and management of The Championships' data solutions to IBM, the Club benefits from a secure, scalable infrastructure, incorporating the latest technologies. Having developed a deep understanding of the Club's culture, brand and values over the years, IBM works in collaboration with its executives and the IT and Marketing Departments to ensure the IT strategy and implementation helps the Club meet its business goals.
One example of this has been IBM's use of cloud computing at The Championships. This provides the ability to add and deprovision hardware and software quickly as and when demand requires – saving costs and energy.
IBM was also able to support the Club's online and interactive ambitions. During the tournament the website saw a tremendous volume of traffic with 15.6 million unique visitors and 451 million page views. The infrastructure that supports the site also deals with tens of thousands of cyber incidents each day. By providing a scalable, robust and secure website, these threats were mitigated, protecting data and ensuring the website was available and responsive 24/7.
Wimbledon.com runs on the IBM SmartCloud™ Enterprise and SmartCloud Enterprise+ infrastructure that allows dynamic provisioning/ deprovisioning of resources, ideal for fluctuating requirements across the sporting year. This highly optimised environment can cope with rapid increases in users whilst simultaneously lowering the cost per user. This enables Wimbledon to deal with tremendous year-to-year growth in traffic, increased user demand yet frees up operational budget for new investments.
An innovative feature of the cloud service provided by IBM to Wimbledon is that the same infrastructure also hosts the other three tennis Grand Slams, the Tony Awards in entertainment and the Masters and US Open Golf tournaments. These events have similarly demanding requirements. Sharing in this way creates a significant economy of scale and allows each event to benefit from a world-class infrastructure.
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