When sports iGaming company, Sportingbet, wanted to offer their customers an enhanced online gaming experience, and reduce the company’s operational and infrastructure costs, they turned to Diffusion. Sportingbet has an aggressive global growth plan, to take advantage of increasing broadband penetration and to provide a high level online sports betting service to a geographically diverse customer base. It needed to improve the customer experience through real-time market data, which was being held back by bandwidth constraints and legacy systems. Following the acquisition by GVC Holdings, Keith Laidlaw CIO at GVC needed to cut IT costs by 50% to help make the company profitable. “In a competitive landscape, it was extremely important to balance the need for e-Gaming innovation and customer experience with the requirement of streamlining data efficiencies and gaining savings on bandwidth. Only then could the company achieve its aggressive growth targets,” explained Laidlaw.
Massive scalability for live data delivery.
Efficient delta-streaming minimized backend strain and costs, elimination of unnecessary polling.
Significantly faster in-play updates, leading to better customer engagement and retention.
To meet their objectives, there were three areas to be addressed; improve the customer experience by providing real-time market information, improving the 10 second delay in delivery it was experiencing, reduce bandwidth consumption to deliver business operation cost savings, and reduce the size of the web estate with extreme data management.
Sportingbet selected Diffusion because they recognized that continued investment in software infrastructure was critical to ensuring their competitive advantage. The company has trading teams worldwide that watch sporting events and must rapidly adjust odds in the sportsbook system as match events happen. Historically, Sportingbet had delivered all dynamic data in its sportsbook system via bandwidth-hungry polling. To reduce bandwidth consumption and deliver the data in real-time, Sportingbet selected Diffusion for its streaming data technology and simple data model management. With Diffusion, Sportingbet can now; quickly gather customer insight, substantially reduce bandwidth costs, and automatically remove out-of-date and stale information, to assure up-to-date, relevant data is always sent.
The result according to CIO Laidlaw is, “The figures when testing Diffusion were remarkable. We were expecting it to handle 30,000 concurrent connections, but three averages showed 60,000, 80,000 and 102,000.” He went on to say, “From the initial testing stage onward, we knew that Diffusion would play a critical role in enabling us to extend our business globally.” DiffusionData has been a key partner in helping Sportingbet achieve its long-term growth strategy. “In the three years since implementation, we have seen a 20-30% growth in revenue thanks largely to our IT investments.”
Using Diffusion’s comprehensive data management capabilities, data distribution has improved, with in-play price updates now
delivered in real-time. With services and tools such as the in-play application working faster, Sportingbet customers now enjoy an excellent customer experience. Sports betting generates up to 60% of the GVC’s revenue and a major new initiative is the match visuals. Diffusion has helped Sportingbet deliver visualizations of matches using real-time data to provide screen updates. Laidlaw explains, “Take tennis for example. Customers are able to follow a match with real-time updates mapped onto a tennis court. Diffusion enables us to push the live data, such as the results of each point and the next player on serve. This intelligent innovation makes games more engaging for the customer, improving the in-play experience.”
Diffusion is integral to future international growth for Sportingbet between the UK and Sportingbet’s Australian datacenters. All data will be handled by Diffusion, publishing data to all Sportingbet customers and companies. Sportingbet is developing new solutions to identify betting trends, so that more relevant and personalized information can be distributed to customers, and they plan to ensure all market and sport related content is delivered with the help of Diffusion. Laidlaw confirms, “DiffusionData is a leader in the eGaming industry and with many companies using the technology it is easier to form partnerships. This is leading to the creation of a unified method for publishing data that is usable on desktop browsers and mobiles or tablets. We have a huge opportunity to do sophisticated things with native applications, as well as to more rapidly identify trends in our customer’s activities.”
DiffusionData’s flagship offering Diffusion® is a secure, real-time Pub/Sub server built for mobile, web, and AI applications. Its patented delta-compression reduces bandwidth by up to 90%, enabling scalable data streaming with minimal latency. Used across financial services, gaming, and transport for mission-critical applications where personalisation and speed matter.
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