Last week saw the 2018 men's tennis season come to an end with the traditional curtain call of the ATP finals at London’s O2.
Tennis is not alone in utilising technology in order to enrich the experience not just for fans, but for players and coaches to mark and develop improvements as well.
Infosys has been a partner of the ATP for some time, and is looking to accelerate and expand this development across the sport of tennis.
The company uses its Infosys NIA platform to crunch huge amounts of data to spot insights and trends that could mean the difference between victory and defeat.
"This is all about amplifying the human potential - we want to make it as intuitive as possible,” Ajay Vij, Infosys Senior Vice President, told TechRadar Pro at a recent event.
“Technology is secondary here, this is about usage, so we want to create end users."
Infosys has been working with the ATP since 2015, and recently signed an extension to its partnership that will see it cover the next two years as well.
This highlights the increasing importance of both deep-level technological analysis, and the data that supports it across the tennis ecosystem, with Vij noting that, “data has been a fundamental bedrock of this partnership”.
The company’s NIA platform is able to ingest vast quantities of data and look at how players are being impacted with the game they are playing, identifying particular trends or aspects of a match that can be the difference between overall victory or defeat.
"From a platform side, as the data sets become richer, the analysis and insights we can derive from that are going to be really helpful,” Vij notes.
“We're on the second half of the chessboard - it's evolving and almost exponential growth is happening from a data standpoint.”
The insights NIA can provide are not just from recent matches, as the ATP has provided Infosys with historical data stretching back 27 years that can help fans, players and coaches track trends and improvements over the years.
"We're making it exciting for viewers both on court and off court as well,” Vij says, highlighting new apps and experiences that use VR and AR technology to put fans right in the heart of the action.
NIA has also helped the development of the ATP Stats Leaderboards, a new statistical way to understand and measure performance of players, and helped fans get closer to the game with a mountain of stats and insights on the favourite players.
All of this helps contribute to a richer experience, not just for fans all around the world,but for coaches and players looking for that extra bit of advantage that could make all the difference.
And with NIA only set to get smarter with the more data it processes, the future looks bright for the use of analytics in tennis the world over.
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