Computer Weekly – For the online sports betting service, Bet365, a fast and reliant network infrastructure is core to its IT architecture. The company upgraded its network to meet this need.
The online gambling website wanted to offer its customers the best “in-play” experience possible.
Whilst competitors focused on replicating the offline experience online, Bet365’s founder Denise Coates decided to focus on the technically challenging in-play betting – the ability to make a bet while a sport is in progress, according to Bet365’s IT team.
The company employs over 2,000 people, is live in 17 languages and aims to deliver an uninterrupted and fast online experience to over 10 million customers.
But offering best in-play experience means the company’s IT team must ensure a robust network infrastructure to make services instantly available and to ensure that a continuous stream of up-to-date odds information is delivered to its customers in near real-time.
“Bet365 is a latency-sensitive business. To get the best from our platforms, we need a network provider whose peering connections can enable us to deliver odds information in near real-time,” says Neil Selby, head of networks and security at Bet365.
Peering is the arrangement of traffic exchanged between Internet service providers (ISPs). Larger ISPs with their own backbone networks agree to allow traffic from other large ISPs in exchange for traffic on their backbones.
But Bet365’s old network infrastructure, which was provided by a tier 2 supplier, was proving unreliable and incapable of coping with pressure of real-time betting. The IT team decided it needed a global carrier rather than multiple regionally strong network providers.
With a global tier 1 provider, the IT department implemented an efficient and resilient global IP network design, which will deliver fast user-experience and optimum geo-routing for traffic.
“We recognised the need to work with a true tier 1 provider to enhance our performance, resilience, and security,” says Selby.
