Inside the Masters Global Content Center at Augusta National Golf Club, there’s a room very few people have ever seen. It sits behind a wall of glass and features an immersive LED screen that’s 21 feet wide and 7 feet tall. This massive screen is built to display a stunningly realistic, interactive digital twin of the most famous golf course in the world. It’s capable of displaying historical data from more than 200,000 shots taken at the Masters over the last 10 years, revealing patterns and insights unique to this tradition that’s unlike any other.
The experts at IBM Consulting® built this wall to visualize one of the Masters’ most valuable assets: its data. Nowhere is data more integral to the player and fan experience than at the Masters. The Masters is the only men’s major played at the same course every year: Augusta National Golf Club. For nearly 90 years, in early April, the best golfers in the world take on some of the game’s most recognizable golf holes. The deceivingly difficult tee shot on Hole No. 12. The treacherous approach shot on Hole No. 11. The narrow, tree-lined drive on Hole No. 18.
Every shot, by every player, on every hole produces more than 30 data points, both structured and unstructured. There are scores, stats, videos, photos, articles, bios and more. This data is the raw material of the Masters digital experience. IBM’s job is to capture, route, process and analyze it all, transforming this massive volume and variety of data into meaningful insights on the Masters app. To do it requires a powerful, fully integrated digital platform that drives innovation and efficiency throughout the entire operation.
That platform starts with the foundation, which consists of an open, flexible hybrid cloud architecture. IBM hosts Masters applications and workloads on multiple clouds in multiple locations, always choosing the best cloud for each workload. So, the team writes many of the applications on the Red Hat® OpenShift® Platform, which means they can write them once and run them on any cloud.
This architecture also allows the AI models and AI agents to operate on data no matter where it resides, and the key to governing that data across multiple clouds is the IBM watsonx.data® data store, IBM’s data lakehouse. Masters’ data is unique, which makes it hugely valuable, but it comes from a variety of sources and trusted partners. IBM’s watsonx.data is designed to collect, curate and prepare it all for use in AI models: structured or unstructured, historical or real time, on premises, in the cloud, or at the edge.
“Watsonx.data is critical to the entire operation,” says Tyler Sidell, Technical Program Director for IBM’s Sports & Entertainment Partnerships. “We know that AI-powered experiences are only as good as the data that fuels them, and with watsonx.data we get access to all the key data sources and the confidence that those inputs are ready for processing.”
To help ensure the entire digital operation runs smoothly, IBM automates key aspects of the IT operation using services like IBM Instana® Observability and IBM Apptio®. These offerings help control complexity, reduce costs and minimize downtime by constantly monitoring the performance of critical applications, automatically provisioning cloud resources, and identifying potential efficiencies in cloud usage.