Betfair SnapShot

“We needed a reliable, scalable application server that would be rock-solid under intense pressure. The JBoss Application Server was selected for its interoperability, maturity, and price/performance.”

-Matt Youill, Betfair.com Chief Architect.

Company Overview: Betfair is the world’s leading betting exchange – a 21st century bookmaker which uses cutting-edge technology to offset its risk perfectly. It thereby gives punters control, allowing them to bet at prices they set themselves instead of being dictated to by the operator. Established in June 2000, the company now employs more than 450 people in offices in the UK.

Challenge:

• Betfair needed to completely rebuild the server platform, as business had developed very quickly, outgrowing their current system.
• Betfair needed an improvement in quality of service, in a busy, mission critical environment of over 2 million bet transactions per day and at peak times 12,000 bets a minute.

Solution:

• After a thorough evaluation, Betfair selected JBoss, due to its wide feature-set, maturity, price performance and reputation in the Open Source community.
• Betfair use 45+ JBoss Application Servers, heavily cached to significantly reduce load on the database.

Results:

• The server system now demonstrates performance improvements of up to 400%
• Dramatic improvement to load on the database.
• All applications can communicate with web services running on JBoss
• A significant saving on project costs.
• Clears way for next project, “System2”, and plan to move to JBoss 4.x Web Services Toolkit.