Bet365 at the cutting edge of IT technology
News on 21 Feb 2014
News on 21 Feb 2014
This week the publication Computing published a mainly technical article on the sophisticated and constantly evolving IT technology necessary to keep UK online betting group bet365 at the top end of the international gambling market.
The operating parameters are staggering; bet365 operates centres in London and Manchester capable of handling 500,000 gambling transactions every second, with capacity to continue operating efficiently under the considerable stress of peak betting times, when live betting on events often reaches extraordinary levels and up to two million concurrent punters can be using the facilities.
The company boasts more than 11 million desktop and mobile customers worldwide, with some GBP 20 billion wagered on its sportsbook alone. Because its sports betting customers bet on popular, time-critical events, such as football matches and horse races, its systems have to have sufficient resilience and capacity to at times handle 200 to 300 percent excess activity over the average.
CEO Denise Coates decided that the company should develop its own network architecture, and as a result the company has invested heavily in developing in-house systems and software capability.
Business continuity 24/7/365 is a key priority for the system, and regular emergency tests are carried out, IT chief Neil Selby told Computing:
“Assuring business continuity and disaster recovery has been a major aim of our investment programme over the past three years. We needed to prove that we’re able to survive a major site outage, due to either a technical failure or the potentially devastating effects of a natural disaster such as fire or flood.”
Computing reports that in addition to duplicating servers and communications equipment to protect against failure, Selby and his division have also had to contend with the company’s rapid growth in user numbers over the past three years, deploying large-scale resilience and growing the network’s capacity at the same time.
“We also have to exploit all possible technical efficiency improvements,” says Selby.
The article is long and mostly technical, but certainly worth a read – especially by IT people.
