IBM Powers Official French Open Web Site to New Records
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WHITE PLAINS, NY (June 11, 1998) – The official Web site of the recently concluded 1998 French Open tennis championships ( http://www.frenchopen.org) was the most highly trafficked official Grand Slam Web site to date, recording 146.9 million server hits during the tournament fortnight, more than three times the total received by the official site of the 1997 tournament.
The peak daily traffic total was 18.8 million hits, registered on Friday, June 5, the day of the semifinal matches in the men’s singles tournament. The traffic also reached a peak of 75,000 hits per minute during the Pioline/Arazi men’s singles quarterfinal match on Wednesday, June 3.
Web surfers were clearly interested in the real-time information the site offered, as they visited the official site’s Results pages most frequently, followed by News and Tournament photos. A new feature of the official French Open Web site popular among fans seeking live results, the Java scoreboard was a downloadable desktop console with a Java ticker updated court-by-court.
Approximately 39% of the traffic to the official site came from European fans, demonstrating the increasing popularity of the Internet in Europe.
The “good luck messages” section, an enhanced feature of the ’98 site, allowed fans to personalize graphic postcards to send to their favorite athletes at the tournament. ‘Net enthusiasts around the world sent close to 36,000 messages to the players at Roland Garros.
“The success of the official Web site for this year’s French Open is a step forward in IBM’s partnership with Roland Garros and shows the added value that technology provides to the world of sports,” noted Pascale Aunis, manager of sports sponsorships, IBM Europe.
The official Web site of the 1998 French Open was designed, hosted and powered by IBM for the Federation Francaise de Tennis. Hosted on the IBM Global Network, the site ran on IBM RS/6000 SPs using Lotus Notes client and Lotus Domino server software, the winning combination that powered the official Web site of the 1998 Olympic Winter Games to world records for a sporting event on the Internet.
Up Next: The official Web site of the 1998 Wimbledon Tennis Championships (June 22 – July 5) is now live at http://www.wimbledon.org, produced by IBM for the All England Lawn Tennis Club.
This year’s French Open Web site far surpassed the marks established by the official site of the 1997 tournament:
1998:
Total hits: 146.9 million
Total page views: 64.0 million
Total visits: 3,965,580
1997:
Total hits: 46 million
Total page views: 6.7 million
Total visits: 416,000
Source: IBM