Online gambling now accounts for 33% of all gambling in the UK, according to the Gambling Commission. In such a fast growing and competitive market, technology choices can mean the difference between being first to market with new products or lagging behind.

Founded in 2000 in North Staffordshire, bet365 is the world’s largest online sports betting business. The company employs more than 3,000 people, is live in 18 languages and delivers an unrivalled online experience to over 21 million customers worldwide.

bet365 is driven by one guiding principle. To be the best in its industry. A lofty goal that it has achieved in spades. With 21 million customers worldwide, it is the largest company of its kind.

This level of success can only come with a huge amount of hard work and a commitment to delivering the very best customer experience possible. However, to maintain the high levels of operational efficiency and effectiveness needed to build a world class company, the business has to be able to answer critical questions that can only be resolved by analyzing the huge amount of data it generates.

Their challenge

By 2009 their existing data analysis system was starting to struggle under the demands the business was putting on it. The data set they wanted to analyze was growing exponentially and the number and variety of queries was also growing quickly, as more departments across the business sought insight.

“Our first product was a general purpose SQL system that was more geared towards processing transactions than crunching data,” said Steve Degg, Regulatory, Compliance & Information Officer at bet365. “To ensure that it could continue to meet demand, we were having to spend a huge amount of time and effort redesigning systems.”

The Solution

To solve the demands of the business, bet365 needed to find a resilient database technology that could deliver results at high speed and for the large variety of user queries. After putting Kognitio’s analytical platform through its paces, it was clear very quickly, that it was the right software for the job.

“From a technological stand point, it did exactly what was needed. Not only could it answer the questions asked at that moment, but it was also evident that it would be able to adapt to all future enquiries, without having to fundamentally change the underlying system,” said Steve.

Since its introduction, the Kognitio platform has continued to scale to meet the challenges of ever increasing data volumes and has become the engine that drives bet365’s in-house data warehousing system.

This has allowed the business to run reports, which had become impossible to run on the previous platform.

The Impact

Kognitio has enabled bet365 to gain insights into its ‘fact’ data from a myriad of different perspectives, whilst allowing developers to concentrate on modelling that data to meet the needs of its end users.

“We need our developers to focus on business problems, not tweaking and fiddling with underlying architectures, so they continue to function under increasing load. For us, Kognitio represents ‘minimal’ loss of opportunity because it not only gives us the insight we need but it also ensures our developers can focus on their key responsibilities,” said Steve.

Kognitio is unlike traditional databases and slower Hadoop ecosystem technologies because it can analyze multi-terabyte data sets in-memory and scale out as demand requires.

Kognitio gives companies, like bet365, fast and reliable ways to query huge volumes of data – with standard SQL or SQL plus scripting languages, such as R and Python – and gain insight in near real-time that would previously have taken hours to analyze.

As more organizations need to obtain insight from their data, they also require solutions that are robust, resilient and can be rapidly implemented. In an industry as fast moving as online gambling, it is vital for organizations to have a system in place that can keep up-to-speed with the rapid rate of change. Kognitio gives users the benefit of high-speed analytical querying, with a rich feature set and resilient architecture.