When Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard’s serve was clocked at 153 mph last summer—the fastest in Wimbledon history—the number flashed on the scoreboard before the ball had stopped bouncing. That instant readout traces back to 1991, when IBM first brought serve-speed radar to the Championships, planting radar guns behind the baselines.
Thirty-six years later, IBM remains Wimbledon’s technology partner, having built the tournament’s website in 1995, its app in 2009, and first introduced AI features in 2017. This year, the partnership was extended until 2030 to carry out a new digital transformation plan, designed, in the words of Wimbledon’s marketing and commercial director Usama Al-Qassab, to “engage more people in more places, more often, in more meaningful ways.”
