For all sports fans out there, the Cloud is becoming a reality for major sporting events. The recent US Open Tennis tournament had over seven hundred thousand estimated people attend the event. Traditionally all these folks would attend the event, enjoy the matches, check the web site, eat delicious food and yell hard at the event to encourage their favorite players. There was a web site for many years that provided information about matches, players and breaking news.

However with the advent of social media and mobile devices, there has been a shift to new delivery channels and innovative ways to communicate. Millions of people world wide followed the event and leveraged social media. The web site was accessed by millions of people and offered live streaming for computers and mobile devices. Not just that but the event generated millions of tweets about player information, past performance, who may win and other personal opinions.

At this recent US Open, IBM used the Cloud for on demand access and scalability. In addition there were iPad, iPhone and Android applications that presented information about the matches and related news. IBM also managed the flood of data through tweets to present interesting information to users based on customization. This is a manifestation of managing Big Data and the Cloud to present information based on analytics for multiple delivery channels. There are many other vendors there that offer such solutions so this is just an example and not an endorsement of a particular vendor. At the event there was a wall that had news, scores, analysis and related information.

There was also a tracking application that assessed data to provide detailed information about players performance during the matches and this was not just a regular tracking application that tracked only match information. It also had features about specific player analysis and presented specific information about how a player had fared in the past, what they were currently doing and specific things they needed to do to win. The exciting aspect was the ability to evaluate mountains of data from a variety of data sources and perform thorough analysis to present interesting information to the users.

For upcoming events, organizations should leverage Big Data and Cloud platforms that handle the volume, velocity and variety of data in an elastic manner. The ability to filter the useful information, perform computations and provide predictions is a key element of such platforms. There has to be an ability to securely detect patterns for data at rest and effectively process data in motion. Continuous monitoring and adjustment based on results is also very important. So when you go to the next US Open, just keep in mind that there is a lot that goes behind the scenes to present seemingly simple information on a mobile device. In my opinion Cloud and Big Data through multiple delivery channels are Game Changers and have started winning major sporting events!

(This has been extracted from and is reference to Ajay Budhraja's blog)

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