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Technology connects sports

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: The sports season is very much here. Starting with Football FIFA World Cup, we have another major tournament, Wimbledon 2010, kicking off today. This means another gush of web and social networking activity.

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Every year sports authorities partner with a technology service provider to manage these fans. While Mahindra Satyam is FIFA's official IT services provider, IBM has the responsibility of Wimbledon 2010. Though IBM has been Wimbledon partner since 1999, it was the first stint for Mahindra Satyam, which is struggling hard to shed the negative image caused by founder chairman Ramalinga Raju's confession to financial irregularities.

Also read: FIFA World Cup to kick off data for telcos

As an official sponsor and technology partner, Mahindra Satyam is responsible of developing the core IT event management system for FIFA and the Local Organizing Committee of South Africa. It has developed an Event Management Solutions system, which manages specific modules like Accreditation, Transportation, Volunteer Management and Space & Material Management.

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The company has developed Extranet and the Intranet for FIFA, and is also supporting application users and has deployed infrastructure and resources at the venue. The company is also providing helpdesk services for the event.

IBM, on the other hand, which has been working on various solutions, took the challenge of reducing energy and making the experience even greener. It says, from June IBM would scale up its infrastructure to meet the demands of a global audience for a critical two-week period on the Wimbledon.org and then scale back down to support normal operations once it's all over.

Also read: Tweeters go crazy about FIFA World Cup

IBM and Wimbledon are creating an infrastructure to keep pace with the tournament by using consolidation, visualization and energy saving. Last year the number of unique visitors to the official Wimbledon website — www.wimbledon.org — reached over 359 million page views from a 10 million in 2008, but energy consumption reduced by 38 percent and server floorspace by 50 per cent.

Apart from this, companies like Phillips, Toshiba have been associated with sports events, as sponsors though. The sponsorship agreements generally includes providing IT hardware and software products such as computers, PC servers.

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