Winner: Betfair

Project: Managing transaction growth

Business goal: To build a real-time transaction processing system robust enough to execute over 1billion bets a year.

Project partner: Citrix, Oracle, Spirent, Sun

In just six years, Betfair has gone from a spare-time project on founder Andrew Black’s laptop to a world leader in online gaming, with 350,000 registered customers and 1,000 staff, half of them working in IT. As a betting exchange, Betfair differs from traditional gambling sites by allowing punters to bet against odds set by other users, with Betfair taking a slice of the winnings.

The percentage of people gambling online in the UK has more than doubled since Betfair opened its exchange, and the market is expected to grow by 22% in 2006, with the football World Cup adding to demand. Betfair’s IT infrastructure has repeatedly proven itself robust enough to handle huge transaction peaks – with the Grand National horserace the traditional high-point.

Up to 5 million bets are placed every day – 1 billion in 2005 – and 99.9% of them are processed in less than a second. The company collaborates closely with all its suppliers to wring every last drop of efficiency from their products. Working with Oracle to tune its database and increase the one-second benchmark from 99.1% of users to 99.9% has had a huge impact: a half second decrease in processing time on five million daily bets saves 28 days of elapsed time, and frees up funds for punters to make more bets.

Betfair chose Citrix’s Netscaler product to help its network cope with the peaks in demand – but only after thorough testing. “Before we buy any product, we stress it and stress it and stress it until it can’t be stressed anymore,” says Thomas Wythe, network manager at Betfair. Netscaler’s raw throughput impressed, as did its scalability. “Each tier – the front-, middle- and back-end to the network – can scale horizontally to take in more and more traffic on the fly, so we don’t need to take our site down.”

While major events in the sporting calendar create what Wythe calls a “heightened awareness” of the risk of the site being overloaded by visitors, 2006’s events required little overtime. “These days we feel that is being less and less called for,” he says. “The technology is working well on its own, and doesn’t need to be prodded and poked so much. We have faith in our infrastructure.”

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