Unisys Excels in High-Pressure Setting

The IT demands of major golf events such as the U.S. Women's Open in South Hadley, MA are very similar to the challenges faced by today's global organizations. Over the years, Unisys has earned a stellar reputation for its performance at these pressure-packed sporting events, where action is measured in real-time and results must be processed instantly, accurately and distributed immediately to a worldwide audience.

One sports official who has witnessed the steady progression of our technical excellence is Mike Butz, Deputy Executive Director of the U.S. Golf Association. Recently, he applauded Unisys for the advances we've made in delivering reliable, real-time scoring systems.

"We certainly have an enormous amount of pressure on us from both the media and the public -- all trying to get real-time scoring information," said Butz. "For the last year, we've been trying to continue to improve the scoring network and the things that we can do -- whether it's graphically, whether it's information that can be available to the public and how can we best do that.

So, we have been working very closely with Unisys to try to improve the scoring system to make it faster information and to provide more information, more interesting information and Unisys has always been there for us."

Each day, some 50,000 spectators flock to the championship, not to mention those who congregate in the nearly 150 corporate hospitality suites during the week. From a media standpoint, the U.S. Open in 2002 hosted nearly 1,600 credentialed journalists and crew who were reporting, recording and broadcasting the action to more than 80 countries worldwide.

Butz said: "The immediacy of real-time scoring is very important to the media, and we want to make sure that we're keeping up with their needs. Unisys has always been there to try to help us through the thinking process, so that we make sure that we are on track with the media."

What's more, Butz said journalists are "always looking to go back and find statistics and research and investigate what happened in previous Open championships. So, the ability to be able to create a database and an archival system that they can access the stats they need, and make it readily available to them, is very important."

Thanks to its involvement with the U.S. Open since the 1980s, the USGA has come to rely on Unisys as a trusted IT partner. In Butz's words, "If Unisys wasn't there right now, I'm not sure where we would go."