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IBM gives the advantage to fans of Roland-Garros with new

digital and cognitive features

Cloud and security solutions for a better performance of the tournament’s website and mobile applications

Paris, France – 30 May 2016: For their 31st year of partnership, IBM and Roland-Garros have enhanced the tournament fan and media experience by providing more real-time information shareable on social networks. In addition, secure hybrid cloud solutions help ensure seamless availability of the official website rolandgarros.com (which this year celebrates its 20th anniversary) and the tournament mobile application which is seeing increased use each year.

Real time information, personalization and sharing enrich the French Open fan and media experience.

This year, the iPad, iPhone and Android applications, developed by IBM in collaboration with the French Tennis Federation (FFT), are enriched with new features. The apps offer tennis fans and media an even more personalized experience with the opportunity to choose favorite players in order to receive alerts and have a news feed tailored to users’ choices.

In addition, IBM SlamTracker™ is now fully integrated with the official website as well as the mobile applications. SlamTracker captures and visualizes real time match data (serves, winners, distance run, etc.), offering visitors an immediate and accurate view of matches as they unfold. IBM has developed in 2016 new tools and features that surface more relevant content in real time either on site or remotely:

• The Tournament Alert Dashboard: alerts teams in real time to key events, including historical and 2016 tournament records or player milestones (i.e. top service speeds, numbers aces etc.) and a range of other statistics that may initially be overlooked. These events can be shared in a timely and relevant manner on social networks to further enrich the content available to fans.

• The Cognitive Social Command Center: (composed of three modules that use the cognitive capacities of Watson*): dashboard of social media conversation

about the tournament that highlights trends and analyzes sources, volume and sentiment of that conversation.

• The videos posted on the rolandgarros.com website are managed with Clearleap solution (an IBM company). Clearleap allows to integrate videos made by the FFT editorial team on the official website in a simplified and accelerated manner.

This year IBM is also using MediaWen International services for the Closed Captioning, subtitling and automatic dubbing in English of Roland-Garros videos which are published on the ibm.com/rolandgarros website and the Youtube channel of IBM France. These videos are accessible to all audiences, including the hearing and visually impaired. MediaWen uses IBM Watson API's – application programming interfaces - including speech recognition (Speech to Text), Machine Translation, speech synthesis (Text to Speech) and semantic analysis tools.

Flexibility, reliability, performance and security are essential criteria for the infrastructure that supports FFT’s innovations

To deal with a large volume of traffic to the official website and mobile applications (57 million in 2015, a sharp increase from the previous year) and website traffic that can increase by a factor of 100 during the tournament, the FFT needs a flexible, reliable and efficient infrastructure. That's why this year IBM has implemented a hybrid cloud platform, with 4 IBM SoftLayer® data centers (which host the scores and editorial content including articles and photos for the website) and 3 private data.

IBM’s top priorities include protection of data, continuous availability and excellent app experience. This is why the company has deployed a range of IBM Security solutions, enabling proactive and comprehensive security through real-time threat analysis and correlation of attacks that allows the team to proactively and continuously protect the infrastructure. These security solutions are also designed to ensure cost control, maintain regulatory compliance and increase the overall performance of the website and mobile applications. *These Watson services are available in Bluemix, the IBM digital innovation platform.

About IBM

If you want more information about IBM and Roland-Garros partnership regarding innovation settled during the tournament, please visit: ibm.com/rolandgarros

For more information on Analytics, please visit ibm.com/analytics

For more information on cloud computing, please visit ibm.com/cloud

For more information on security, please visit ibm.com/security

For more information about what IBM does in the field of sport: ibm.com/sports

About Roland-Garros

Since 1996, the Fédération Française de Tennis (French Tennis Federation), which organizes the Internationaux de France, provides the visitors access to the official website of Roland-Garros conducted jointly with IBM, for all the news of the tournament. The Content Management Department of the Marketing & Communication division of the FFT provides real-time, full editorial content that is available in two languages: English and French. Throughout the fortnight, users from around the world can read minutes of matches and the echoes of the tournament, but also the player biographies, view photo albums. They can attend the post-match conference, see the most beautiful areas or

behind the scenes as well as feel the atmosphere of the tournament through videos daily topics and listen all day live broadcasts of Radio Roland-Garros, in English and French. As well as the FFT website, www.fft.fr, the website www.rolandgarros.com is also available since 2003, throughout the year. It offers all information related to the stadium life during the rest of the year, including a detailed presentation of the Museum of the French Tennis Federation, the shop, the “Roland-Garros” restaurant and stadium guided tours.

For sports lovers, as for the general public, Roland-Garros is a must-attend event, enjoying an immense prestige. 463.328 spectators attended the Internationaux de France in 2015, while the event was broadcast over 224 territories around the world, giving the tournament its dimension of global sporting event of the utmost importance. Organized by the French Tennis Federation, Porte d'Auteuil, Roland-Garros is the only Grand Slam tournament to compete on clay court, one of the oldest and noblest surfaces of tennis history.

Contacts Information:

IBM Gaëlle Dussutour Tel. : +33 (0)1 58 75 17 96 DUSGA@fr.ibm.com

Roland-Garros Département Presse Tel. : + 33 (0)1 47 43 48 00 communication.fft@fft.fr

Text100 pour IBM Aline Dubucq Tel. : +33 (0)1 56 99 71 38 Aline.dubucq@text100.fr