Bet365 CTO uses Flash and mobile to stay ahead of the game

Bet365 was established in 2000, and was one of the first in the betting industry to launch online gaming. The company has recently taken the lead again with updates to its In-Play betting system, which provides more control of its personal IT cloud and allows data to be processed faster.  

The firm's chief technology officer, Martin Davies, spoke to V3.co.uk about why the updates were necessary, how he keeps Bet365 ahead of the innovation curve, and the challenges of finding the right staff.

In-Play betting allows players to bet on an outcome while a sport is in progress. The supporting technology must process a continuous stream of real-time information to give the latest data to gamblers placing their bets, and to ensure the correct odds are established. Data changes rapidly with In-Play betting, often through mathematical models without any human intervention.

Davies explained that he wanted Version 4 of In-Play to cover more data, but with reduced latency. This meant doing away with Bet365's traditional Ajax approach to publishing data, which was proving increasingly costly as it consumed a lot of bandwidth and used a growing amount of hardware.

The way the Ajax model works is by supplying users with information by continuously taking snapshots of all the data.

"We decided to employ a publish and subscribe model instead where users register the information they want to see, and we only send them this information, so we use less bandwidth, and only supply players with relevant data," Davies said.

The Bet365 IT department started the change to the new push model 18 months ago and it went live earlier in April. All the data is stored in the company's personal cloud, which has been entirely developed by Bet365's in-house IT department using Java, C++ and .Net technologies.