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"Serving Up another Wimbledon Winner"
 "Serving up another Wimbledon Winner" describes the challenges of, and technology behind,
supporting the Wimbledon Tennis Championships, where the team managed by IBM grows
from a handful during the rest of the year to about 150 people during the 2 weeks.
The Championships are a high profile event, with around 2 billion TV viewers and 4 million
unique users on the web. It is a complex environment needing high quality TV Graphics, and
support for publishing 40,000 items to the web site daily. There are physical site-related
challenges, political challenges involving meeting the needs of the All England Lawn Tennis
Club, the broadcasters, the players and the public, as well as the considerable technical
challenges of combining continuing advances in technology while meeting unprecedented
performance levels with 100% availability, and all against an absolutely immovable go-live
date. The latter point should be of specific interest to the Project Management community!
Our Speaker is Roger Blake, who spent nearly 40 years working for IBM before retiring in the middle of 2005 – just
after the successful conclusion to that year's Championships. He was the Technical Consultant to the
All England Lawn Tennis Club for the past fourteen years, responsible for the technical solution design
and delivery. Roger held various roles in his time with IBM, from his early days as a Systems Engineer, through
being country technical support for Large Systems and then as an architect of systems requiring
complex solutions. He was appointed as an IBM Distinguished Engineer in June 2000 and his final role
was as Technical Director for the Consulting and Services part of IBM, responsible for the technical
health of projects in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and South Africa. Wimbledon was just one of
these projects. Roger is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the BCS, and a Chartered IT Professional.
Event Logistics
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Date: |
Wednesday 18 Jan 2006 |
Time: |
19:00 (refreshments from 18:30) |
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Chicago Room, Building 3
Microsoft Campus
Thames Valley Park
Reading
RG6 1WG
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Bookings: |
Please do one of the following:
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