Middleware Consulting International

LONDON, June 23, 2021 — Today IBM and the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) are announcing new technologies to enhance the highly-personalised, fan experience available on Wimbledon.com and the Wimbledon apps. These enhancements will put IBM Watson, running on IBM Cloud, and hybrid cloud capabilities in the hands of millions of tennis fans around the world ahead of the start of The Championships 2021 on Monday 28^th June, the first return to live tennis at SW19 since 2019.

As the Official Technology Partner of the AELTC for the past 32-years, IBM has designed, developed, and delivered innovative digital experiences to engage sports fans around the world. Leveraging the same AI and hybrid cloud technologies IBM uses with businesses across industries and around the world, Wimbledon continues to accelerate innovation and improve the digital fan experience.

New Fan Experiences

For the 2021 tournament, IBM is introducing three new fan experiences for Wimbledon fans which highlight the company’s focus on data, language and automation.

IBM Power Rankings with Watson

Wimbledon brings in fans beyond the sport of tennis, and often, outside of the big names, they don’t necessarily know who to pay attention to, who is in form, who is the pundits’ pick to win? To help answer these questions, for the first time this year, the AELTC will leverage IBM Power Rankings with Watson, an AI-powered analysis of player performance presented as a leaderboard, that updates every day of the tournament.  IBM Power Rankings focus on a player’s most recent match history, combining advanced statistical analysis, the natural language processing of IBM Watson, and the power of the IBM Cloud to analyse daily performance data, mine media commentary, and measure player momentum tournament to tournament and match to match.

From these same analyses, a series of predictive insights are generated including:

• Ones to Watch — A pre-tournament view of players who have moved significantly up or down in the rankings.
• Upset Alerts — Matches in which the Power Rankings favour the lower seeded player.
• Likelihood to Win — Power Rankings assign a win probability to both players prior to the match.

IBM Power Ranking analyses both structured and unstructured data via an AI model that was built using IBM Watson Studio for Cloud Pak for Data. AutoAI in Watson Studio helps create likelihood to win scores faster and more accurately by automatically building AI models and generating candidate pipelines to drastically reduce iterations for better predictions.

IBM Pre-Match Insights with Watson

Building off the success of Match Insights with Watson which was used for the first time during the 2020 US Open, Wimbledon’s digital properties will feature a Pre-Match Insights with Watson ‘fact sheet’ for every main draw singles match. The AI-generated content will surface player insights to better inform fans with current player performance detail ahead of each match. It will present the IBM Power Rankings and it will generate a likelihood to win prior to the match beginning, anticipating the outcome before the first serve is even struck.

The fact sheet will also feature an ‘In the Media’ section that leverages IBM Watson Discovery to create a custom news archive, and natural language processing (NLP) to extract key insights about each player from trusted news sources and it includes a ‘By the Numbers’ section that leverages open source AI technologies such as natural language generation (NLG) to translate historical match statistics into player insights, as well as IBM Decision Optimisation to select the insights to display to the fan.

Personalised Recommendations and Highlights Reels

Once a fan has worked out who to follow via the IBM Power Rankings, we have worked to provide them with additional value through a series of personalised recommendations and highlights reels. These are created through a Rules-Based Recommendation Engine integrated seamlessly across Wimbledon’s digital platforms, giving fans the opportunity to engage with more personalised content.

This will feature ‘picked for you’ recommended players, which enables fans to discover new players by making suggestions based on their current favourited players, the IBM Power Rankings, top players, country, and age. The recommendations will evolve over the course of the tournament and alert the fan to newly recommended players. The recommendation engine also includes smart links to other features such as the IBM Power Ranking Leaderboard and Pre-Match Insight with Watson features. In addition, if you are registered with myWimbledon, you will receive personalised highlights based on the players you are following.

Underpinned by Hybrid Cloud

Wimbledon’s IBM-powered digital experience uses a combination of on-premises systems, private clouds, and IBM Cloud, the same components that make up the hybrid cloud environments in which enterprises increasingly operate. Several of the features in the Wimbledon digital experience are built as containerised apps and deployed on Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, which allows them to run them across hybrid cloud environments, enabling flexibility, efficiency, and an accelerated pace of innovation.

Alexandra Willis, Head of Communications, Content and Digital, AELTC

“We are absolutely delighted to be launching these significant new innovations in partnership with IBM to further enhance the Wimbledon digital fan experience. We know how challenging tennis can be to follow and understand, especially for those who don’t follow the sport year-round, and so, by creating these three new features – the IBM Power Rankings, the Pre-Match Insights, and the Personalised Recommendations and Highlights, we hope to make it easier for fans to know who to follow, and to get more value out of their experience with us. Partnering with IBM continues to be a critical part of our strategy to disrupt the traditional perceptions of Wimbledon through innovative and transformative uses of technology and deliver an incredible digital sports experience to fans around the world.”

Kevin Farrar, UK Sports Partnership Lead, IBM UKI

“For over 3 decades, IBM has helped develop and deliver innovative & engaging digital fan experiences for Wimbledon. With reduced capacity on-site at Wimbledon this year that digital engagement is more important than ever, and by leveraging AI and hybrid cloud technologies, fans can get the experiences they are used to – no matter where they watch the tournament.”

One of the world’s largest jewelry brands by volume uses IBM Sterling Order Management on Cloud to revamp its fulfillment capabilities and customer experience

ARMONK, N.Y., June 21, 2021 — IBM has worked with Pandora, a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of hand-finished jewelry, to help Pandora transform and scale its global omnichannel e-commerce capabilities with IBM Sterling Order Management. Pandora, one of the world’s largest jewelry brands, was able to double its online sales in 2020 and is now leading the jewelry industry with improved real-time inventory visibility to better manage growing demand.

Pandora’s focus on innovating new customer experiences included using IBM Sterling Order Management to help to increase the company’s supply chain resiliency and business agility, and better mitigate disruptions and risk. By automating more of their order orchestration across channels, they also have opportunity to improve the sustainability and resiliency of their supply chain operations with more efficient delivery.

“Over the past couple of years, Pandora has made significant investments in digital capabilities and data, and we have consolidated, simplified and modernized the technology stack to bring digital and store technology closer together and closer to the customer,” said Jim Cruickshank, VP of Digital Development & Retail Technology, Pandora. “Our mission is about creating a personal experience and we’ve instituted massive platform changes with IBM Sterling and Salesforce to enable new digital-first capabilities that are much more individualized, localized and connected across channels and markets.”

Pandora’s entry into e-commerce over the last six years most recently led them to consolidate legacy technologies while deploying the new order management solution across its key markets. Using IBM Sterling Order Management as its backend for omnichannel fulfillment and Salesforce Commerce Cloud for e-commerce, Pandora created a seamless shopping experience across channels. By automating order orchestration processes, store associates and virtual customer service representatives are able to have an end-to-end view across inventory, order and delivery status to help meet consumer expectations.

To support this ambitious objective, Pandora established a Digital Hub in Copenhagen, Denmark, with dedicated digital, data and tech teams that have played a vital role in the solution’s quick deployment entirely remotely. As the pandemic forced Pandora to temporarily close most of its 2,700 stores, the digital investments in supply chain efficiency helped fuel the company’s e-commerce success. In addition to some of the go-to fulfillment options many retailers offered such as buy online pickup in store (BOPIS) and endless aisle, Pandora also introduced more innovative approaches such as virtual queuing for stores and AR-based virtual trials of products to help drive more immersive customer engagement.

“The global disruption every industry experienced as all forms of commerce were severely impacted by the pandemic was especially challenging for organizations with disconnected distributed order management systems and limited scalability,” said Jordan Speer, Research Manager – Global Supply Chain, IDC Retail Insights. “This vulnerability created a push to more quickly advance technology adoption that helps retailers better respond to fluctuating consumer dynamics. To meet this changing demand, enterprises are looking to harness new tools to achieve increased levels of supply chain resilience and efficiency while also allowing for more virtual interactions.”

Pandora’s detailed view on order and order lines as well as near real-time inventory management helped to improve insights throughout their systems chain spanning warehouse management solutions, e-commerce and customer contact center. This was further enabled with increased automation from self-service capabilities and the use of chatbots aiding customer support functions as Pandora experienced a massive increase in order volumes.

“The lifeblood of the global economy, consumer behavior, has significantly shifted and will continue to evolve with businesses needing to quickly adapt to new preferences and needs. To address this shift, leading retailers like Pandora rely on innovation to increase their business agility by enabling and scaling sustainable supply chain operations using AI and cloud,” said Kareem Yusuf, General Manager, AI Applications and Blockchain, IBM. “Pandora’s experience shows that they can stay competitive as business and technology leaders are finding new ways to create differentiated customer experiences that protect their enterprises from disruptions to help mitigate risk and accelerate growth.”

To hear more about Pandora’s omnichannel experience using IBM Sterling Order Management view their THINK 2021 keynote detailing how they continue to execute on their strategic initiatives by navigating one of the world’s greatest supply chain disruption.

About Pandora
Pandora designs, manufactures and markets hand-finished jewelry made from high-quality materials at affordable prices. Pandora jewellery is sold in more than 100 countries through more than 6,700 points of sale, including around 2,700 concept stores.

Headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, Pandora employs 26,000 people worldwide and crafts its jewelry at two LEED certified facilities in Thailand using mainly recycled silver and gold. The company plans to be carbon neutral by 2025 and has joined the Science Based Targets initiative to reduce emissions across its full value chain. Pandora is listed on the Nasdaq Copenhagen stock exchange and generated sales of DKK 19.0 billion (EUR 2.5 billion) in 2020.