Digitising Sport and Business: The Infosys Europe Story

No one can play just once. Those who come to our Dusseldorf Hub find the virtual reality tennis demo so addictive, they end up missing some experiences on their tour of our facility. Here, you can get transported into Stade Roland-Garros and play a game of VR tennis against simulations of the world’s top ranked players. It’s every tennis fan’s dream come true: to feel like you are on the clay. It feels so real.

I myself have sometimes been guilty of spending more time on the VR module than I should. After having spent so much time in this virtual Roland-Garros, I was really looking forward to attending the real tournament this year and hosting some of our clients from Germany and Europe. Not to mention seeing the best on clay showcase amazing skill and endurance. So I suppose, more VR it will be then for a while. But VR is just one part of our amazing Roland-Garros partnership. In a way, it represents everything that Infosys does and stands for, and is a microcosm of our larger strategy.

Rapid Digitization: Driving the Future

It has been around 18 months since Infosys joined hands with Roland-Garros as Digital Innovation Partner. In this short span of time, the digitization of the tournament has included data, artificial intelligence, cloud services, mobility, open-source and virtual experiences. Our clients are amazed by the complexity and granularity of the work we do for tennis: it is a data-rich sport.

Data is at the heart of all our tennis innovations, like MatchBeats - a new way to follow the game for fans, and Infosys AI Videos, which combines data analytics with powerful deep learning algorithms to create a new kind of video analytics. When businesses see this, they are inspired to create the same for the way they work and the way their customers live. If you can have AI clips for players, why not for automotive performance testing? And like a MatchBeats for every tennis point, can there be a factory beats: a live stream of shop floor efficiency for every batch on the assembly line? Questions like these are leading to better answers for over 300 of our clients across Europe, including many large DAX30 and Mittlestand enterprises in Germany, who we are helping transform into digital-native organizations. How do we do it? By embracing a new way to work.

Diverse Collaboration: Making the Change

Our teams who work on tennis are from different parts of the globe. They speak tennis, they speak Ruby on Rails, they speak French, they speak user empathy. These varied skills come together behind the scenes to make an unforgettable tennis experience: they are able to do it because they augment each other’s capabilities.

Infosys CourtVision is a technology that captures performance trends with an on-court mapping of possibly every statistic there is in tennis. This team includes the tennis statisticians in Paris, the data modelers in Bangalore, and the user experience designers in London. One knows the game, one translates the game into technology, and one takes the technology into a visual form that is a delight to consume. It takes all of them to shape a digital game, and it will take all of us to shape our digital future. That’s why our offices in Germany are no longer offices: they are Innovation Hubs, Design Studios, Living Labs. Here, we collaborate with large industry leaders and emerging start-ups in different fields. We also work closely with universities to stay on the edge of what’s next: we have over 50 university partnerships across Europe, including research collaborations with the RWTH Aachen University here in Germany. This creates a powerful ecosystem effect for us to take change wherever we want to, but change ultimately begins right around us.

Hyper Localization: Being the Navigator

As a global company, Infosys’ commitment to the geographies in which it operates is seen through its partnerships. The Roland-Garros partnership is one of many different kinds of transformation programs. Infosys has partnered with the World Economic Forum through the Reskilling Revolution Initiative. The initiative aims to provide one billion people with better education, skills and jobs by 2030. This change is important.

Navigating the future of a sporting tournament is as relevant as navigating the future of an industry. Local knowledge with a global impact platform is what accelerates the digital future. Ensuring a historic tournament like Roland-Garros is accessible to millions more is something one person might be passionate about. Another person might make it their mission to create sustainable mobility and transport. To pursue this passion means deeply embedding yourself in client values and embracing the culture. In the past two years in Europe, Infosys has increased hiring of local talent by 50%. This gives thousands more the opportunity to be a true navigator of the change they wish to see, while growing the team of 18,000 navigators in Europe who are making a better digital future for business and sport.

The tennis of the future will be different from the game some of us see now. To put it into perspective, think of how the playing styles of athletes have evolved so much: when I was growing up in the 1980s, a young girl from my country was making waves on the clay court: Steffi Graf. Now, there is another young player on the verge of stardom: Coco Gauff, whose game seems so much more nuanced than the players of yesterday. Also in the 1980s, what we had was Pascal and Cobol: that was my first taste of programming. Today, there is an entire universe of technologies, waiting to be learned and implemented for better outcomes. When we emerge from this crisis, there is so much waiting to be changed. So what will you change? As one of my heroes Jane Goodall said, “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

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Behind the #15Love Experience: This blog series celebrates the spirit of collaboration and innovation that went into shaping the Roland-Garros 2020 digital landscape. Follow Infosys on LinkedIn to hear stories of passion and purpose from the teams at Infosys and French Tennis Federation (FFT), as they talk about the next normal in experiences, partnerships, technology and branding.