IBM improves Wimbledon service

With the strawberries and cream season less than a week away, IBM is planning to serve up the kit necessary to support the volley of hits that the official Wimbledon website will attract.

This year is Big Blue's 12th year as infrastructure provider for the Wimbledon Tennis Championships, and the company said it will be bringing further enhancements to the "cyber-courts" of the All England Lawn Tennis Club.

IBM will be introducing match analysis through a commentary system, scoring and information displays, "speed of serve" radar systems and multimedia content, on wimbledon.org.

Back in 1990, court technology only went as far as providing a basic scoring and results service and TV graphics. Over the years, the website has taken a pummelling, with users left unable to access it on more than one occasion.

This year, however, IBM has beefed up the hardware with RS/6000 SP web servers and Netfinity 4000R servers running Linux, serving content to the production servers.

The website is expecting to deliver well over 100 million pages over the championship period.

Wimbledon fans can follow the tournament through mobile phones and handheld Wap devices at wap.wimbledon.com.

Jeff Lucas, the Club's IT director, said: "The website has made a huge difference in terms of awareness. Our guest book is full of compliments from all corners of the Earth."