ITF brings real-time intelligence to the Billie Jean King Cup with Azure

The International Tennis Federation needed a way to deliver real-time courtside insights from hundreds of thousands of data points per match, ensuring every team could make confident decisions under intense match pressure, regardless of resources.

To solve that challenge, the ITF built a real-time intelligence platform that unifies match telemetry and delivers instant, on-court insights fueled by Azure and Microsoft AI orchestration.

Real-time processing of 700,000-plus data points per match now delivers instant, trustworthy insight on court, improving decision-making windows and standardizing access for teams from around the world.

In elite tennis, every moment matters. Coaches often have less than 30 seconds between points, but historically, the critical insights needed to improve gameplay didn’t arrive until hours after a match ended. For the International Tennis Federation (ITF)—the governing body of global tennis and organizer of the Billie Jean King Cup by Gainbridge, the world’s largest annual women’s team competition—this delay wasn’t just inconvenient; it was inequitable across teams.

Tathiana Garbin, Captain of Italy’s Billie Jean King Cup team

“When data’s available consistently, it helps you quickly read key percentages and playing patterns (both ours and the opponents’) and supports tactical decision-making in a clear, immediate way.”

Tathiana Garbin, Captain of Italy’s Team, Billie Jean King Cup

With 140-plus nations competing at the Billie Jean King Cup, some teams bring full analytics support while others rely only on intuition. This creates a competitive imbalance the ITF wanted to correct, delivering real-time, data-driven insights to every team, regardless of resources.

“When data’s available consistently, it helps you quickly read key percentages and playing patterns (both ours and the opponents’) and supports tactical decision-making in a clear, immediate way,” says Tathiana Garbin, captain of Italy’s Billie Jean King Cup team.

This led the ITF to build a real-time intelligence platform, the foundation of the Match Insights app that delivers validated data fast enough to influence coaching decisions. Because this intelligence layer was built specifically for the Billie Jean King Cup environment, it had to perform under intense pressure, where trust in the data was just as critical as receiving answers quickly.

“We weren’t only solving for speed. We were solving for fairness and scalability all at once,” says Jamie Capel-Davies, Head of Science & Technical at the ITF.

Engineering a reliable, scalable intelligence layer

At the Billie Jean King Cup, match strategy unfolds at game pace. Each match generates more than 300,000 ball-tracking data points and 400,000 player-positioning data points, alongside scoring and rally patterns. But the issue wasn’t collecting the sheer volume of data. It was turning it into trusted, consistent insight usable during play.

Working with Microsoft partner Valorem Reply, the ITF built the Match Insights app, which sits on top of an intelligence backbone that unifies ball-tracking, scoring feeds, and telemetry into a single, trusted model. Valorem Reply helped build the ingestion and transformation layer, so insights based on terabytes of data could reach coaches quickly.

The following video walkthrough shows how the Match Insights app aggregates live ball‑tracking, player‑positioning, and scoring data into a unified dashboard. Patterns, trends, and stat combinations appear in real time to inform tactical decisions during live Billie Jean King Cup matches.

Match Insights solution walkthrough

Coaches and captains can now see patterns and shifts as play unfolds. AI apps and agents on Microsoft Azure, supported by Azure Databricks and Azure Data Lake Storage, turn the raw feeds into structured data. Azure SQL Database provides curated, optimized intelligent query processing, helping ensure every coach and captain accesses the same accurate view of match dynamics, with no discrepancies between courts or sessions.

To then translate complex statistics into usable guidance, the ITF added an AI-driven interpretation layer. Instead of relying on an analyst courtside, coaches and players can ask the app direct questions, such as where an opponent is winning the most points on serve. Using Microsoft Foundry in conjunction with Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models for the interpretation layer, coaches now receive immediate, context-rich responses that support confident mid-match decisions.

All of this engineering work is in service of a single goal: delivering real-time clarity to captains and coaches who must make decisions in the moment.

“It was fantastic to have the Match Insights app available during the 2025 Billie Jean King Cup Finals. Access to real‑time data proved invaluable for our coaching staff and meaningfully supported in‑match decision‑making throughout the competition.”

Lindsay Davenport, USA Team Captain, Billie Jean King Cup

Moving from architecture to action on the court

Coaches don’t get extra time to think. So, insights must be fast, consistent, and reliable.

To ensure the platform would perform reliably in real-world conditions, the ITF collaborated with tournament officials to simulate network disruptions and peak levels of simultaneous users. Azure App Service played a critical role by delivering dynamic scaling, maintaining fast response times, and supporting automated failover. These capabilities were key to helping ensure coaches and teams could access real-time data in the Match Insights app without interruption. The rigorous tests confirmed the platform could scale and continue delivering responses in under two seconds, even while processing millions of data points across multiple concurrent matches.

“It was fantastic to have the Match Insights app available during the 2025 Billie Jean King Cup Finals. Access to real‑time data proved invaluable for our coaching staff and meaningfully supported in‑match decision‑making throughout the competition,” says Lindsay Davenport, captain of the USA's Billie Jean King Cup team.

The platform was designed to ensure match intelligence stayed consistent across venues and sessions. Each authorized coach could see the same validated picture of play without delay or discrepancy. Role‑based access controls helped ensure that only approved users could access match intelligence in high‑pressure, onsite environments.

Automated failover and geo‑redundancy protected courtside access, so teams didn’t lose insight during pivotal moments.

Results that travel beyond the court

The impact of bringing real‑time intelligence to the Billie Jean King Cup was transformational. During live competition, the system processes more than 700,000 ball- and player-tracking data points per match. It has generated over 1,500 stat combinations during live play—fast enough to influence changeovers and confirm tactical shifts.

This real-time intelligence platform, and the Match Insights app it powers, now sets the competitive standard for how teams prepare, adjust, and make pressure-time decisions.

“Now every team walks onto the court with the same confidence. Whether you’re a powerhouse nation or a smaller delegation, we’re lifting the standard of the entire competition.”

Jamie Capel-Davies, Head of Science & Technical, International Tennis Federation

Coaches can validate momentum shifts, identify emerging serve or return patterns, and adjust strategy between points rather than relying on post‑match analysis. Just as important, every team has access to the same trusted picture of play, ensuring consistency and fairness across all teams.

These outcomes marked far more than technical achievement. They established a new competitive standard for the Billie Jean King Cup where critical insights are built into the core of the competition.

“Now every team walks onto the court with the same confidence. Whether you’re a powerhouse nation or a smaller delegation, we’re lifting the standard of the entire competition,” says Capel‑Davies.

Real-time intelligence raises the competitive standard

Looking ahead, the ITF is exploring with Valorem Reply how its intelligence platform can expand into predictive analytics and generative AI capabilities. These advancements will always be anchored to the same requirements that defined the initial deployment: accuracy in the moment, trust at every decision point, and equal access for all teams. Future enhancements, whether advanced scouting tools or expanded analysis models, will build on an architecture already proven in the most demanding conditions.

The ITF’s journey illustrates for IT and engineering leaders what’s possible at the edge of real-time AI. Multi-stream telemetry, once considered too latency-sensitive for live environments, is now being processed in subsecond windows. Insight pipelines validated against official match records ensure teams can trust every pattern surfaced. Workloads that span simultaneous matches across venues are operating reliably at global event scale.

The blueprint is clear. Start with a high-stakes, time-critical problem where milliseconds shape outcomes. Build an architecture capable of normalizing high-frequency data streams. Validate performance under real-world pressure. Ensure that every insight delivered is consistent, explainable, and available to every stakeholder at the same moment.

For the Billie Jean King Cup, this approach delivered more than fast data. It introduced a new competitive standard where clarity, fairness, and reliable insights in real time are part of the foundation of the sport. For organizations charting their own real-time AI paths, the ITF’s success shows that when intelligence can keep up with the moment, innovation isn’t theoretical—it’s operational, trusted, and ready for global scale.

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