Deafening crowds and 7 million data points: IBM at the US Open

Going further under the hood, to make the AI-powered Match Chat efficient, the IBM infrastructure team used automation so that the OpenShift clusters-the platforms for managing and deploying containerized applications in the hybrid cloud environment-could accommodate the increased capacity needed when peak numbers of fans were using the feature during the tournament. Instead, the automation allowed the team to build new worker nodes that it could bring online as needed during the tournament and turn off after the main event.

"We can literally click a button on our automation to say, 'Hey, grow to this amount of CPUs and RAM or add new worker nodes right away,'" said Andrew Young, an Associate Partner of Infrastructure at IBM, in an interview with IBM Think. Using an infrastructure tool from HashiCorp called Terraform, which integrates with OpenShift clusters, the team automated the provisioning of resources across the US Open hybrid cloud infrastructure to maximize performance and minimize cloud costs. Automation is used to grow and shrink other parts of the infrastructure as well, such as the databases housing the moment-to-moment information.

Just as top tennis players learn key lessons from every tournament they play, the IBM team debuted Match Chat at Wimbledon earlier this year and identified improvements to the system that helped them prepare for the US Open. During the 2025 Wimbledon tournament, Match Chat recorded 5 million interactions.

"Match Chat worked better than expected at Wimbledon," said Young. "We gradually turned it on-first on Centre Court, then No. 1 Court, and so on. We had more capacity than we thought we needed. So, for the US Open, we have right-sized it to maximize its efficiency."

A second key back-end component being used at the 2025 US Open is Apptio, which analyzes the US Open's cloud consumption and helps identify opportunities to save. It's currently managing the cost of 5,197 resources spread across 12 different cloud accounts.

"With the number of resources, the time it would take for a human to go in and spot check all those resources is not remotely viable. It would take too long," said Susanne Bull, Solution Architect at IBM, in an interview with IBM Think. "Apptio gives us a tool to spot check and say, 'Oh, hey that looks wrong. We should go look at that right now, to save us time and money."

"With platforms like this, it's very easy to just leave the lights on, and Apptio helps us make sure that we turn the lights off when there's nobody in the room," added Hammer.

Rounding out the critical tools that operate in the background to help reduce costs and downtime for the 2025 US Open is Instana, a service to monitor applications on the US Open digital platform. Instana updates every second and can identify, trace and resolve issues before they impact fans' US Open experience. "With customized dashboards, we can see whether one database is running hotter than another database, for example, or whether we need to increase the capacity of the OpenShift ingress controller," said Young. Instana also helps IBM monitor third-party integrations-there are over 30 different companies that integrate with the platform to perform various services for the USTA related to creating or distributing content.

As the team that develops and designs the US Open digital platform, IBM Consulting works with these vendors to create a seamless, integrated experience. The combination of these back-end tools is built to work together so that even if traffic swells or security incidents happen (millions of incidents are mitigated per year), there won't be any interruptions for the fan.