Serving Up The Digital Experience: From Tennis To Enterprise

If there’s one thing we’ve learned this year, it’s that all businesses are a digital business. Or if they aren’t, they absolutely need to be. This is true even of sports. It has become essential to place digital at the heart of the sporting journey.

From training to watching to reporting, everything that is part of a tournament should be put through the digital funnel. What goes in is a process, what comes out is an experience. That’s just what our teams have been doing over the past few years for tennis, and for this year’s Roland-Garros, they have had to dig deeper. To explore new depths of what’s possible so they can scale new highs in experience.

At the core of the tennis transformation has been data, insights and digital experiences, which are the three planes of possibility. The common digital superhighway uniting all three planes is the Infosys Tennis Platform, architected to be plug-and-play. This is where data sets, insights algorithms, experience libraries all reside. Plug into any one or as many as you’d like, and you have yourself an experience. This is the secret to rapid conception and execution, which has aided our team in scaling to deliver 15 innovations for Roland-Garros 2020. Their spirit is being celebrated as #15Love and while the technologies on offer are breakthroughs for tennis, I thought it would be good to see the reinvention philosophy through the enterprise lens.

So what inspiration can businesses find in our tennis innovations? Here are five takeaways that could well be pointers to creating enterprise game changing ideas.

1. You can never have too many ways to play with data. What we are sensing with the Infosys Match Centre is that fans can’t get enough of data visualization. You can see the points as streaming analytics in Infosys MatchBeats or as performance patterns in Infosys CourtVision. With each changing interface comes a different perspective. That’s what the data-rich enterprise world needs more of: becoming richer visually, so that information is more accessible, comprehensible and actionable.

2. The insight itself can be the experience. This year, we have created a new way to look at data in a 360° view with Infosys 3D Match Centre. Transforming the 2D CourtVision that fans already know and love into a new dimension isn’t just insight, it’s also a form of immersion. The same is true of taking the Match Centre into the Fan App: a tap or a pinch is more playful and frequent than a click, and this new medium enables far greater interaction. Now imagine taking all the data that an enterprise owns and turning it into experiential products: there are possibilities everywhere from the store shelf to the car dashboard. Enterprises can tap into newer digital streams that amaze consumers by uniting data, insights and digital experiences.

3. Serve innovation fast and furious. The same core can serve varied users with different contexts. At Roland-Garros 2020, our AI engine for match videos is being applied to enable strategy for players, analysis for journalists, and highlights for fans. This is made possible by building the video workbench as a generic micro-service to be used across innovations, with a reusable component library. The same approach can accelerate the path to value for enterprises: just take sustainability for instance: the same data layer can serve different apps from sourcing to corporate reporting to e-commerce. Build once, then keep serving outcomes.

4. Open source is the only way to stay open for continuous reinvention. Sensational today will be standard tomorrow. Reimagination and agility will be the constants, at least for the foreseeable future. That’s why the Infosys Tennis Platform is built using a wide range of open-source software, from Apache to Kubernetes to Sunbird. The intention here is to not to hedge your bets in terms of architecture, but to harness the best of what every tool or framework can deliver.

5. Design digital to reduce distance. It’s tempting to think that digital is all about enabling the remote experience, especially given the circumstances of the year. But digital is actually meant to be a unifying medium that can bring people closer: like enabling players and coaches to collaborate and train with Infosys AI Videos. When digital is as immersive as the physical medium in all its forms, sights to actions, is when its true potential will have been realized.

While we celebrate the digital transformation at Roland-Garros this year, I hope 2021 and beyond will see full stadiums so we can create fuller digital experiences by continuing to unite the best of both worlds: physical and virtual. Our teams, I have no doubt, are up to the task.

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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.