Wimbledon and IBM have renewed their 30-year partnership with a new long-term contract. The newly structured deal sees Wimbledon invest in IBM’s business and technology consulting capabilities, which will further help to deliver the tennis tournament’s digital backbone. The deal also includes the formation of an in-house team at the All England Lawn Tennis Club that will combine expertise from both partners and work year-round to deliver innovations for the tournament. Discussions over the new deal were completed late last year. “What is fantastic about the partnership we have with IBM is it has longevity, therefore there is incredible trust,” said AELTC Head of Communications, Content & Digital Alexandra Willis.
Wimbledon was canceled earlier this summer because of the pandemic. IBM and Wimbledon are launching The Greatest Championships on Monday, a digital version of the tournament that will feature 50 of the event’s best historic matches on an IBM-built platform. Fans can watch entire matches or scan through them quickly using several different IBM tools, for example choosing to watch just a match’s service aces. Thirty-three of the older matches’ video quality was enhanced, and all of the content has been annotated with commentary, editorial and data.
“Having a kind of sit-forward experience was incredibly important to us,” said Sam Seddon, IBM Sports & Entertainment sponsorship lead for the U.K. Willis said, “We didn’t want to just do what everyone else was doing and we had the advantage of a little more time to react and go beyond just playing our archive. We really wanted to recreate the feeling of the anticipation of the reveal of matches.”
