Once upon a time the tennis commentary from Wimbledon was a sedate affair. They called it Lawn Tennis. Borg served. McEnroe returned the serve, and Dan Maskell whispered: "Oh, I say" into the microphone. Once in a while, McEnroe's return landed on or about the line, and the redheaded fury wouldn't like the call. "That was in", he would shout and throw his racket across the court. "You can not be serious", he would yell at the umpire, who was an unpaid middle-aged tennis fan from the shires and oozed an aura of quiet disdain. McEnroe's temper gave him focus, and unsettled all his opponents except Bjorn Borg - and he usually won, even if he later had to pay a fine for "ungentlemanly conduct", or "abuse of the racket".

The plucky Brit
These days, everything has changed. The sense of discrete calm and and gentlemanly decorum that Dan Maskell so effortlessly embodied, and McEnroe did so much to disrupt, has been replaced by an altogether more slick and efficent atmosphere. The game is faster. The players are more athletic. The staid and fussy atmosphere we used to know and love has gone, and McEnroe, once the scourge of umpires and commentators everywhere, is a commentator himself, working for the BBC. McEnroe is voluble and articulate, and is as much loved now as he was once feared and loathed, as an irascible (if middle-aged) scamp, who says the things that everybody else thinks but nobody else says. And up on Henman Hill, a thousand McEnroes whoop and holler in support of the plucky Brit who never wins. So some things never change.

Noticeably, today the TV commentaries are a much more professional affair. Maskell may have been the greatest of the old-style commentators, loved by everybody, at home in your sitting room - the more exciting the action on the court, the more quiet and soothing Maskell's voice would become. But he never had access to the vast array of statistics that are available to those who sit in the box today. Every point is punctuated by an observation of where so and so's serves have landed, and which were more likely to be returned. The current commentary team consists almost entirely of ex-players, many of whom, like Boris Becker and McEnroe, were Wimbledon champions in their own right. But so were the commentators of previous eras. What gives the current commentary team an edge over their predecessors is instant access to an extraordinary range of statistics on every player in every game. Which is where we came in.

Backing the serve
At every match on every court during Wimbledon fortnight there is a match analyser. The match analysers are junior, county, national or international tennis champions who can be described as experts in the game of tennis, whose job it is to analyze each match, point by point, stroke by stroke, and capture key bits of information on every point that is played - where the serve landed, how the serve was returned, and how the point was won. Was the point won by a forced or an unforced error? Was the winning shot a forehand or back hand? Was the point won with a volley, a smash, or a passing shot? Was the serve an ace, or was there a double fault? Such information is captured for every point of every match. Less statistics are captured for doubles matches because of the different nature of the game. Otherwise, a complete set of statistics is captured in real time for every point that is played, whether it be for the prestigious title events, the Mens and Ladies Singles, or the unsung junior, veteran, wheelchair and desk tennis events that are an integral part of the calendar.

For the commentators this makes all the difference. As experienced players and commentators they know the nuances of the game, but the statistics give support to their observations and theories about the progress of a match, and the subtle changes in tactics employed by the players to change the course of events, or to unsettle their opponents. The commentator system, which runs on a Linux intranet, provides a comprehensive analysis of how each match is progressing. There are 24 or 25 statistics that tell how each player is performing, and the commentators' display does a head to head on the statistics for the opposing players. Commentators can use a comparison of these statistics to drive discussion and analysis of why one player or another is doing better at any particular stage of a match. The statistics are supported by TV graphics that show the speed and placement of each player's serves from either side of the court. These services are provided by IBM who work very closely with the BBC and the All England Lawn Tennis Club to design the graphics, both in terms of 'look and feel' and in content.

The statistics are also used by the players and their coaches, who devour them as they come off court, and learn from them what their tactical weaknesses might be. For a game that is ostensibly about power and athleticism, tennis has strangely powerful elements of psychology. Tactics and strategy have a large part to play, and the players have an equal opportunity to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of their next round opponents.

Wireless and blue
The information is also made available to print journalists and to the paying public at interactive terminals and kiosks around the ground. Broadcasters, journalists and photographers are able to access the Internet wirelessly from WiFi-enabled notebook computers. In addition this year, immediate courtside image uploading over wireless was provided for professional photographers from Centre and Number One Courts, and IBM carried out an on-site pilot of streaming live match action to wireless devices.

A secure campus-wide wireless LAN was installed at Wimbledon for the duration of the Fortnight, enabling officials, hospitality guests and media to log onto the internal Wimbledon Information System network throughout the Grounds. And, for ‘Pocket Wimbledon’ PDA users worldwide, IBM optimised the Wimbledon Web site for PDA display over GPRS, so that users were able to stay up to date with latest match scores.
Simultaneously, the scores of matches in progress are updated in real-time on the Wimbledon Web site, using ThinkPad notebook computers running DB2 on Linux. At the centre of the content management system which distributes information through the intranet, which is known as the Wimbledon Information System, and the scores onto the internet, are WebSphere portals. As if to prove IBM's neutrality towards the Linux distributions the intranet solution runs on Red Hat powered servers on xSeries, and the Internet solution runs on SUSE Linux.

The IBM WebSphere Application Server is Apache based and is built on open standards. The IBM WebSphere Business Integrator Event Broker is used to enable real-time distribution of each live score on the Scoreboard and the Web site. A DB2 Linux database is used to tally the on-site scores and to generate match statistics, with live scores, draws, completed matches and player biographies, and Tivoli provides monitoring for the infrastructure.

Over 200 Personal Computers and ThinkPad notebooks are interconnected through a high speed high-speed LAN to form a virtual editorial room within the Wimbledon grounds. This network lets the Wimbledon tachnology team simultaneously manage the global server complex, deliver live scores, record interviews and develop, edit and publish content. IBM eServers also supports the Club's financial, ticketing and debenture systems.

Net call
At the first Wimbledon Championships in 1877 there were only 22 players and 200 spectators. In 2003, there were 470,000 spectators and 2 billion television viewers from 159 countries. The Web site was accessed by more than 4 million unique users from 166 different countries. Visitors to the Wimbledon Web site during the Wimbledon fortnight downloaded the standalone application that delivers information directly to the users' desktop scoreboard as the scores change - every point, for every match, 5.5 million times.
The Wimbledon Information System contains statistics on every game played at Wimbledon since the first championships, and detailed analysis of every match since 1990, when IBM first became involved, which means that journalists and coaches can research a player's statistics at any time during the last fifteeen years, although the number of statistics that are recorded for each match have multiplied during the last five years.

The intranet went over to Linux this year. IBM use Wimbledon as a technology showcase, and despite the profile that Wimbledon gains during the fortnight of the Championships, the All England Lawn Tennis Club is a very small business for the rest of the year. A small business can expect peaks and troughs, and needs an infrastructure that is supportable but can expand to meet the peaks when they occur. Wimbledon provides an extreme example of this phenonemon, and Linux on xSeries has proved to be cost-efficient and reliable, which is why both IBM and the All England Lawn Tennis Club went for the solution.

Coins and kiosks
But Linux isn't new to Wimbledon. Elements of the Web site have been run on Linux since 1999. As far back as 2001, 16 coin-operated Internet kiosks running Linux were installed by pieNETWORKS. "We came across the fact that one of the key things that was missing from Wimbledon was Internet access for the public," said Bryan Levine, the company's managing director. Despite the fact that IBM was Wimbledon's chosen technology partner for the tournament, pieNETWORKS secured the deal. "We just approached Wimbledon and said 'How about it?', and they said 'yes'. We were pleasantly surprised that Wimbledon let us do it as IBM was the main company at the tournament, but I think that it was because it's not their core business. Internet-based kiosks are what we do for a living."

The installation consisted of 16 kiosks branded with Wimbledon colours. Eight kiosks were placed in each of the two halls at the prestigious tennis club, the Aorangi Food Court and the Café Pergola. Two ADSL connections were installed to provide the Internet connection, one in each hall. "We provided on-site staff, and for the first two days we had two people - one on each site which were around 300 metres from each other," said Levine. "But after four days we only needed one as the kiosks were so reliable."

The kiosks cost £1 for ten minutes of email or general browsing use, but it was free to surf the official Wimbledon site. The kiosk screens used a 15-inch flat monitor, and IceWM window manager. "You can actually make IceWM look like Windows on each box, with a command bar on the bottom, a start button and so on," said McBrier.

"People who walk up to one of our kiosks know exactly what to do with it." The underlying technology was a stripped down version Linux. "It's a bit like the old IBM VMS where we actually create a specific environment for that single user," Levine recounted at the time. "After the user ends the session, the kiosk gets reset again from a copy of that cut-down environment. It's like Linux within Linux. Then we have our custom made software that controls session times, counts money and checks the connection. Some of that is written in Tcl/Tk, some in C and some is Perl script." The kiosks at Wimbledon were part of a network of over 700 world-wide which all reported back to a central database to interpret log information into user statistics. Everything was based on Linux.

pieNETWORKS have been using Linux since 1995. Around the time of the first Internet cafés, McBrier said, "We looked at that and thought, 'Well, that seems like a good idea, but it would be good if it were everywhere.' And the only way to do that was to use a phone box attitude, where someone walks up and approaches the kiosk and drops coins in a slot. We looked at Windows to see if we could build a model on that. Then we looked at Linux - back then it was pretty unknown. We found a guy, the president of our local LUG at the time, who introduced us to Linux and raved about what it could do. We developed a system based on it and rolled out six kiosks at a cafe in Australia. It just grew from there." To start with, it was the flexibility of Linux which made it the obvious choice for pieNETWORKS. "The reason we use Linux is that it is an open source operating system and it gives us the control we need to do what we actually want to do", He said.