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Formed in 2016, Paddy Power Betfair is the world’s largest publicly quoted sports betting and gaming company. Paddy Power Betfair operates four brands—Paddy Power, Betfair, Sportsbet and TVG—that bring “excitement to life” for five million customers worldwide. As an international, multi-channel operator, the company is online-led, mobile-led, sports-led and focused on regulated markets. Paddy Power Betfair is listed on the FTSE 100 index of the London Stock Exchange and has 16 locations across the globe.
Requiring near-real-time access to very large data setsSports betting and e-gaming companies like Paddy Power Betfair (PPB) operate in a fast-paced and highly competitive market. They’re open 24/7/365, and are constantly striving to provide customers with the best online experience—or risk seeing them go to a competitor. To deliver that experience, PPB needs to manage massive volumes of data, and access and serve it with very low latency levels.
The merger of Paddy Power and Betfair in 2016 created an additional data challenge for a highly data-driven organization. The merged company had to bring together 70TB of data, from dozens of sources, into an integrated platform in order to ensure timely access to consistent, aligned, high-quality data. In addition, PPB needed an architecture that would enable them to cost-effectively scale up quickly to meet the huge spike in demand that occurs when big events, like the United Kingdom’s Grand National horse race, take place, and then scale back to normal levels of usage.
“The problem was, we were using a legacy infrastructure that was unable to keep up with our growing business needs,” says Steven Cochrane, Director of Data, Paddy Power Betfair.
Why Talend?To meet its challenges, the PPB data team embarked on a rapid implementation of a new data platform, leveraging leading big data technologies and scalable, cloud-based services. “Talend has been at the core of this implementation and a significant contributor to the efficiency gains in our data delivery process,” says Oana Iacovita, Head of Data Delivery for Paddy Power Betfair. “Working with an open source company like Talend has also meant we’ve been able to extend the product capabilities.”
According to Iacovita, “Talend has been a definite winner, not only for its functionality, but also for its successful integration with cloud and other big data technologies. We started with a core team of 15 developers who worked on building reusable Talend frameworks and patterns and deploying these in a cloud based, high-availability, Talend environment. As of today, we’ve brought onboard our entire team of 60 engineers, who are successfully using Talend to deliver data solutions to our different departments. We’re also well on our way to delivering an integrated data solution that provides a combined view of our merged businesses.”
Talend also fit perfectly with PPB’s cloud strategy, which it adopted principally to deal with the huge spikes in usage during the most popular sporting events. “We are leveraging a virtual private cloud environment as it offers
Betting on a cloud-based architecture to deliver a better customer experience
“In our business, if we didn’t have access to high-quality information with low latency, we simply couldn’t operate. Talend helps us achieve that.
CA S E S T U DY
INDUSTRY
• Online betting
INFORMATION• HQ: Republic of Ireland
• 5,001-10,000 employees
USE CASE• Customer experience
CHALLENGE• Requiring near-real-time access to very large data sets
TALEND PRODUCT USED• Talend Real-Time Big Data
RESULTS
• Development time reduced by 50%
• Scales up rapidly to meet demand spikes
”Steven Cochrane, Director of Data, Paddy Power Betfair.
the flexibility and scalability needed to respond rapidly to changing customer behaviour,” explains Iacovita.
Providing a better customer experience while cutting data delivery times in halfPPB uses big data to get a 360-degree customer view, drive customer engagement and optimize the betting experience. The goal is to make sure its gamers keep coming back and that they enjoy a quick, reliable, and glitch-free experience, even during large sporting events.
“Our dual-brand, unified platform is used by every department in the organization,” says Cochrane. For example, we use data to understand how our customers are using our products and platforms to give them a better customer experience. The commercial team uses the insights they can derive from the big data platform to really understand and segment the customer base: which customers find which sports most popular, on which brands, through which channels and which products.”
Cochrane adds that big data outlined two customer segmentation types across both brands, with little overlap. Betfair customers tend to be “money-centric,” focusing on the best odds and the site’s reliability. They’re also more interested in football and racing bets. Paddy Power customers are “thrill-seekers” and “social,” seeking the best entertainment and ease-of-use, and have more emotional attachment to the brand.
According to Iacovita, the integrated platform PPB is building that leverages the capabilities of Talend is providing the business with timely and consistent measurement of business performance across products, channels and brands. “It‘s providing our departments with ready-to-consume data sets,” she says, “which removes the overhead of downstream manipulation in the business units.”
Iacovita says that “the pattern- and framework-based approach allows us to cut the delivery time of on-boarding new data sets to half. The flexibility of having a tool like Talend that is cloud-hosted allows us to build a strategic, scalable, cloud-based architecture whose benefits go far beyond our data development practices and efficiencies.”
“Talend is a core strategic component of our Data platform. It enables reporting, analytics and data science activities that require high volume/low latency data to be effective and provide the timely insights stakeholders rely upon to take time sensitive actions,” adds Cochrane.
“In the betting market, using data to understand and react to changing customer behaviour and business events faster than your competitors is key. Agility is really important for us in a world where minutes and hours can have a significant impact on our bottom line.”
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