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dsp have worked with many highly reputable and well-known clients, and have achieved incredibly successful results on all projects. This case study overview features Ladbrokes and Hotels.com
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LADBROKES
Summary
08701 999 377
Ladbrokes is the largest betting company in the United Kingdom, and whilst their industry involves a great deal of risk, they try to avoid that aspect within the operations aspect of their company.
After carrying out some internal expansion, Ladbrokes realised that they needed to improve the Oracle system they currently ran in order for it to run on Sun hardware. dsp worked with Ladbrokes to organise innovative software and hardware solutions that offered the consistency and reliability that they needed.
LADBROKES
Requirement
08701 999 377
Ladbrokes was suffering with the possibility of downtime, which was impossible in a business that ran in real time.
They needed to find a way to remedy the situation with minimal interruption to the business. Furthermore, they wanted to explore cost-effective options because the company was not quite ready to completely overhaul and upgrade its software and hardware for back-office operations.
LADBROKES
Solutions
08701 999 377
The first step was to upgrade to more powerful Sun servers, specifically a new tier of two Sun 440 servers. The existing Database tier was moved to a faster and more stable Sun M5000 server, then dsp assisted Ladbrokes in migrating to the new Oracle Solaris system whilst maintaining the existing software.
The most innovative aspect was the use of a software migration strategy that leveraged Oracle Solaris Containers virtualisation to allow Ladbrokes to run their existing software at the same time.
LADBROKES
Business Results
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The project ran between March and November 2010 and proved outstanding results. The performance has increased between 50-80% overall.
For example, the payroll accounting department used to take approximately 11 hours to process yet now takes under 3 hours. Furthermore, the employee-record reports used to take approximately 40 minutes to process and now take only 6 minutes at most.
LADBROKES
SUSAN TRAPP, IS
DEVELO
PMENT CONTR
OLLER
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“dsp have provided Ladbrokes with 24/7 database administration and Unix consultancy for our 11i environment since 2000. The consultants, both remote and on site, have provided a good and essential service both during projects and for regular mission-critical maintenance. They’re part of the team.”
HOTELS.COM
Background
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Hotels.com is a multi-billion dollar business and one of the world s largest hotel booking ‟websites, receiving millions of visitors every day to its 85 localised sites supporting 34 languages.
The mantra for the business for 2011 was “go faster”. Ultimately, this meant improving the speed to market for new products and the development life cycle.
HOTELS.COM
The requirement
08701 999 377
When he joined the company, Silberg, who had experience of using Agile techniques for offshore developments, inherited a waterfall systems development life cycle (SDLC) which was delivering one code release into production every 12 weeks.
Initially, Hotels.com reduced the elements of the cycle to four weeks each which, with parallel developments, lowered the time to release to eight weeks, but the goal was to go faster still.
HOTELS.COM
The solution
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dsp offered an IT partnership that helped build an Agile team for the project and their first task was to split the application. An aggressive timeline was set by Hotels.com as they also had to keep delivering new business functionality during that time.
dsp took their role as Agile enablers very seriously and, when they felt that progress was not as rapid as expected and they needed to improve the Agile performance in the team, they were able to voice their concerns and gain a greater commitment to Agile principles from the business.
HOTELS.COM
Business Benefits
08701 999 377
More idea testing is available thanks to agile. They quadrupled the number of releases in a year and expect to see efficiencies of around 20-25%. This is an important moment for Hotels.com.
The big benefits have come from the improved SDLC and planning for relieving developers of the administration necessities and improving their environment. The partnership with dsp has freed up space to focus on faster and more long lasting goals.
HOTELS
.COM
STUART S
ILBERG, VICE PRESID
ENT OF TE
CHNOLOGY
08701 999 377
“At the end of the day, it’s all about relationships with individuals. The evidence is that the people from dsp really do care and have a sense of ownership and responsibility, which is quite rare. The integrity shines through- they play fair, communicate very well and I feel like I’m getting value for money.”
FOR M
ORE INFORMAT
ION
FEEL FREE TO
CONTACT U
S ANYTIME
08701 999 377
www.dsp.co.uk
14 Floral StreetCovent Garden
London WC2E 9DH
United Kingdom
