ACCELERATING THE ONLINE
BETTING
MARKET
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DIGITAL BETTING’S FRONT RUNNER In order to remain competitive, Paddy Power Betfair has looked at the needs of its customers and fully digitised its service offering. Cathal Sheridan, Technology Director, tells us more WRITTEN BY
CATHERINE STURMAN PRODUCED BY
JAMES PEPPER
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H
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eadquartered in Dublin,
“Accelerating innovation around
Ireland, bookmaker
customer application development
Paddy Power Betfair
has become a focus. We work to
(PPB) has come a long way in the
constantly shorten the ideation-to-
short time since its formation
production cycle using agile,
through the merger of rivals Paddy
continuous delivery and infrastruc-
Power and Betfair in 2015. Both
ture automation. In parallel,
organisations came from humble
improving pricing for customers
origins taking a journey that has
requires running increasingly
completely digitised the customer
complex mathematical models on
experience, opened new markets
progressively more sophisticated
and developed new tools to drive
infrastructure. We have witnessed
innovation to further attract and
significant investment and
retain its growing customer base.
advancement in these areas in
Technology has been critical to the growth of PPB, as the global online betting market has risen from
recent years,” explains Technology Director, Cathal Sheridan. “Infrastructure is at the heart of
$20bn in 2009 to over $40bn in
this. For example, within a pricing
2016. PPB has put an emphasis on
model a Monte Carlo analysis can
offering the best features in
consume vast arrays of hardware
responsive applications coupled
with huge fluctuating capacity
with powerful and keen pricing
demands in low latency environ-
models that offer greater value to
ments. Similarly, developing
customers. Digitisation has also
analytics engines to understand
enabled the business to offer the
customer preferences requires
right products for customers at
significant processing power and
optimal times, harnessing sophisti-
large data stores.”
cated analytics whilst developing
The PPB Infrastructure team has
an exceptional digital infrastructure
set about achieving a No/Low-Ops
along the way.
environment for its software
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“DEVELOPING DEEPER ANALYTICS ENGINES TO UNDERSTAND CUSTOMER PREFERENCES REQUIRES PROCESSING POWER AND LARGE DATA STORES. TECHNOLOGY IS AT THE HEART OF ALL OF THIS” 08
— Cathal Sheridan, Technology Director
deployments, but also powerful A/B testing features to allow delivery teams to trial the effectiveness of new customer features,” says Sheridan. “Creating the pipeline technology has been a joint project between infrastructure and delivery teams, resulting in the ability to make thousands of deployments weekly. “Both Paddy Power and Betfair had very strong technology assets to draw on. Betfair had put a greater focus on owning the software that encapsulates differentiating product IP, crucial to creating
delivery teams by removing itself as a
market-winning customer experi-
dependency in the code-to-deployment
ences. While Paddy Power had a
process. To do this the team created its
particular strength in infrastructure
new infrastructure stack, i2 (Infrastructure
resilience and scaling.
v2), encompassing a private software
“Interestingly at the time of the
defined datacenter (SDDC) and a fully
merger we discovered that both
automated continuous integration/
teams had highly aligned views on
deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. This has
the future of CI/CD and the
given software delivery teams the ability to
importance of delivery pipelines for
independently deploy their applications
iterative product development and
using the i2 pipeline to acquire compute,
rapid delivery,” he continues.
storage, and network resources, independent of PPB’s infrastructure team. “The pipeline had to be flexible, not only offering rolling updates and blue-green
“Right from the start we had common ground making it relatively straightforward to choose the strongest design thinking from each
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“BOTH PADDY POWER AND BETFAIR HAD VERY STRONG TECHNOLOGY ASSETS TO DRAW ON, SO WE BUILT OUR NEW STACK ‘I2’ ON THE BEST OF BOTH” — Cathal Sheridan, Technology Director
organisation and create the optimum
‘heritage’ stacks in favour of its new i2
private cloud and CD pipeline configu-
architecture, PPB has on-boarded
ration.”
almost all of its service catalogue to
From there, the full design of i2 was
the new infrastructure to provide
established and PPB set about
the benefits of the ‘software
creating a global platform capable of
defined everything’ environment
serving multiple products to millions of
as early as possible.
customers across its many brands and
“This was about enabling innovation
geographies. This became a funda-
by expediting the product and feature
mental integration work stream within
delivery process. We knew this would
the newly merged entity.
also have a positive impact on our
By rapidly decommissioning its
ability to resolve service issues through
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immutable software and virtualized hardware. On top of that, the new platform brought us to higher levels of resilience,� notes Sheridan. BUILDING RESILIENCE Whilst the company continues to make serious inroads into the public cloud, using it extensively for its corporate systems, the retail technology estate, and a growing portion of its online customer w w w. p a d d y p o w e r b e t f a i r. c o m
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Click to watch: ‘Paddy Power Betfair Standing Out’ 13
workloads, PPB continues to invest in the i2 private cloud for strategic and regulatory reasons. The i2 private cloud harnesses the open-source OpenStack platform to better serve its developer community. All i2 infrastructure elements are now virtualised guaranteeing complete autonomy in the provision of infrastructure for delivery teams. “We chose OpenStack to create
“ OPENSTACK GAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO JOIN A THRIVING COMMUNITY BUILDING A GREAT SDDC PLATFORM BACKED BY SERIOUS INDUSTRY CONTRIBUTORS” — Cathal Sheridan, Technology Director
self-service infrastructure provisioning. We leveraged its w w w. p a d d y p o w e r b e t f a i r. c o m
FACTS
Merging with rival Betfair in 2015, Paddy Power Betfair has completely digitised the customer experience
well-designed infrastructure
The global, online betting market has risen from $20bn in 2009 to over $40bn in 2016.
translated this into faster release
PPB has sought to develop powerful predictive models to price more keenly and offer greater value to customers.
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PPB’s new infrastructure stack, ‘i2,’ encompasses a private software defined data centre (SDDC) and a fully scripted continuous integration/continuous (CI/CD) pipeline PPB has sought to serve millions of customers across multiple brands, geographies and products through its transformation. By rapidly decommissioning its ‘heritage’ stacks, PPB has on-boarded its entire service catalogue, providing benefits across its ‘software defined everything’ environment.
abstraction layer to create the i2 CD pipeline and our developers directly cycles,” explains Sheridan. “At the same time, OpenStack gave the Infrastructure team real choice around vendor selection for both technology and services based on its open source credentials. This allowed us to join a thriving community building a great SDDC platform backed by serious industry contributors. “We were able to cherry-pick from a wide selection of vendors to build multiple service level options into the stack. For example, we reviewed a range of storage platforms and included a number of offerings with the majority of the developers choosing NetApp for applications with high I/O workloads,” he continues. “OpenStack has proven to be both stable and performant and allowed us to push on with other elements of our integration work without having to revisit these fundamental requirements.”
TECHNOLOGY
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“WE DEPLOYED PURE STORAGE AS THE LOW LATENCY PERFORMANT STORAGE PLATFORM FOR NICHE APPLICATIONS, WHILE WE USE NETAPP FOR LARGE HIGH I/O WORKLOADS” — Cathal Sheridan, Technology Director
By partnering with international technology company Computacenter, PPB was able to move ahead quickly with its technology transformation leveraging the Computacenter expertise in Infrastructure design and implementation. “Our challenge was to build a new stack and migrate more than 5 million customers to it from an incumbent architecture built up over a decade – all within two years,” observes Sheridan. “PPB is a FTSE 100 company with a great reputation for technology, there
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This enabled it to embrace the Component Ownership model which flourished to deliver a more reliable overall technology estate. It is now setting its sights firmly on a
Click to watch: ‘A normal day at Blip’
Low/No-Ops model, whereby all infrastructure is available at the highest possible level of abstraction. Consequently development teams
was really no room for error. Having a partner like
are now spending less time on
Computacenter definitely lightens the load.
infrastructure scripting and more on
“Choosing the right partners is important. In addition to bringing Computacenter onboard, we 18
innovating and solving for customers. “From a customer outcome
also made an early call to build i2 on the Red Hat
perspective this is a far more
OpenStack distribution. Red Hat gave us access
productive use of our developers’
to a level of expertise and support that translated
time, especially as we can now auto-
into delivering a more robust infrastructure in a shorter timeframe. “The cross-vendor support model we have created around OpenStack has allowed us to rapidly problem-solve and determine root cause as we worked through transformation issues. We achieved this without any material service interruption to our business. DEVOPS TO NOOPS PPB was an early convert to DevOps and had integrated infrastructure engineers within delivery teams to reduce handovers and dependencies between engineering functions.
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mate much of how the infrastructure handles resilience,� says Sheridan. “We faced a collective technology challenge while moving away from DevOps teams having direct access to hardware, to instead using the i2 pipeline as the gateway to the infrastructure. This involved huge collaboration across the entire technology team but the advantages of standardised access to infrastructure was clear to all. Migrating its software onto the new i2 stack therefore involved significant testing, w w w. p a d d y p o w e r b e t f a i r. c o m
verification and collaboration. This is, of course, on top of complexities resulting from the unveiling of the annual sporting calendar and the subsequent change-vigilance periods this imposes on the business. “We had to paint the aircraft while we were still in the air. We had to flex, scale, and provide resilience within a platform we were actively building while simultaneously delivering capacity to meet fluctuating customer demand” 20
depicts Sheridan. “There were also significant technical challenges along the way as the target stack was made up of a component/vendor configuration that was new at the time. We set aside considerable resources to thoroughly stress test the infrastructure at key points in the build. We relied on the fact that the OpenStack community had done a great job defining the roles that compliant components must adhere to. We benefitted directly from this but also contributed back the community”.
FACTS
Its European customer base has been found to value speed and ease of use above all else PBB has strived to launch products which fit neatly with its customers lifestyles, marrying its online and retail offerings to guarantee an exceptional experience across all touch points. Providing the best prices, the widest possible market choice and a continuous stream of new features has been fully underpinned by the use of data analytics, machine learning and automation.
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“ THE I2 NETWORK IS BASED ON NUAGE NETWORKS’ SDN AND SD-WAN TECHNOLOGY THAT ALLOW DEVELOPER VIRTUAL NETWORKS AND SCALE THEM IN AN ONDEMAND MANNER” — Cathal Sheridan, Technology Director
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CUSTOMER FOCUSED
concerns the value customers place on
From its high level corporate
application speed and ease of use, as well as
mission to its individual brand goals
launching products that fit neatly with customer
and developed features, PPB
lifestyles. PPB is also working hard to further mar-
adopts a customer-first approach.
ry its online and retail offerings to guarantee an
As all objectives are linked to KPIs
exceptional and consistent experience across all
based on measurable customer
touch points. Providing the widest possible
benefits, a huge aligning effect has
market choice and a continuous stream of new
been created across the entire
features has been fully underpinned by the use of
organisation and driven a common
data analytics, automation, and modern
language across disciplines. This
infrastructure.
has made communicating ideas
Its product performance in terms of customer
faster and driven further innovation.
journey efficiency, page load times, transaction
Much of this innovation work
times etc., are all actively monitored. The
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company not only collects
teams and (b) the manner in which the i2
quantitative and qualitative
network architecture (leaf-spine) allows us
feedback from customer groups,
to deploy new and immediately-addressa-
but also runs regular user experi-
ble physical hardware.
ence lab sessions with customers
OpenStack’s flexibility is foundational to
to find product enhancements
i2 and PPB has maximised its use of this by
around usability, speed and
working with vendors that embrace the
personalisation.
elasticity of the environment. For example,
“Many of these activities require
the i2 network is based on Nuage
ever more compute cycles that rely
Networks’ SDN technology. This allows
on the ability of i2 to scale-out
developers to create virtual networks and
seamlessly based on (a) Open-
scale them in an on-demand manner. This
Stack’s capacity to easily deliver
type of flexibility was simply unavailable
more virtual infrastructure to our
just a few years ago. w w w. p a d d y p o w e r b e t f a i r. c o m
ONGOING GROWTH Long-term, from a high level digital perspective, PPB will continue to look at its overall operating model to further strengthen its ties between its commercial, product, and technology teams. “We never stop trying to find better ways to run our business. We rely on our capacity to evaluate and consume the latest generation of technology to differentiate and solve issues, including the scale 24
challenge we expect as our customer base moves through another major growth phase,” reflects Sheridan. At a corporate level, the business is also set to further expand its reach in the US sports betting market. Its recent long-term agreements with Meadowlands Racetrack in New Jersey and Tioga Downs in New York will see it offer a full suite of cutting-edge products, compete with US competitors and provide a world-class customer experience. “Technology continues to play a significant role in our growth story
“ PPB IS WORKING HARD TO FURTHER MARRY ITS ONLINE AND RETAIL OFFERINGS TO GUARANTEE AN EXCEPTIONAL AND CONSISTENT EXPERIENCE ACROSS ALL TOUCH POINTS” — Cathal Sheridan, Technology Director
and we constantly deploy new tools, such as data streaming, public cloud, AI and machine learning to drive this. From an infrastructure perspective, we have also put a real focus on Kubernetes and containers as a hosting platform and will likely see much of our customer-facing workloads move on to this technology through 2018/19 using the i2 pipeline capabilities” adds Sheridan. By investing in building multi-skilled teams and continuous learning, PPB has fully embraced constant change to remain a key player by empowering its people. The company remains a formidable competitor in a thriving industry. “We work in a large complex organisation but one that, importantly, has held tight to its entrepreneurial roots where ideas come from anywhere and your personal impact on the bottom line is always visible,” concludes Sheridan. “Our teams solve new problems every day. The pace we operate means we can see the results of our efforts very quickly. That’s what makes it a really great place to work.”
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Head Office, Paddy Power Betfair Belfield Office Park, Beaver Row, Clonskeagh, Dublin 4Â T +1800 238 888 www.paddypowerbetfair.com