The UK provider of sports betting and gambling services Sky Betting and Gaming announced that it has entered into a partnership with Cloudera Enterprise with the aim of strengthening its positions on the online gambling market. Sky Bet, which is a division of Sky, has a weekly client base of approximately 500,000 customers who will benefit from personalised gambling experience and money-back promotions.
Sky Bet is largely owned by CVC Capital Partners and the partnership with Cloudera means it will substitute the enterprise data warehouse for its very own platform built on Apache Hadoop.
The main reason why Sky Bet decided to opt for a partnership with Cloudera is that it wanted to provide its clients with enhanced performance as far as ingesting, processing and analysing data were concerned. Meanwhile, attempts for implementing real-time processing and machine learning will also be made.
The Sports Betting Director at Sky Bet, Ted Moss, announced that there has been an improvement in three key areas namely fulfilment speed of promotions, analytics and personalisation. He went on to say that Sky Bet has previously used company’s warehouse and as a result, the development of these three areas was halted.
Sky Bet offers the so-called “no lose” promotions. In other words, the punter can receive a payout even if the original bet is a losing one. However, some clients were dissatisfied with the fact that they have to wait one day in order to get their reward. Mr. Moss went on to explain that if that time is reduced to a couple of minutes or hours, that would lead to huge revenues.
He said that through Cloudera, the time for handling out fulfilments is limited to a few minutes and within a few months, it is expected to become instant. Mr. Moss also added that if everything goes according to plan, the IT operations of Sky Bet will be transformed by Cloudera, which is a huge leap towards adopting innovative online gambling solutions.
Sky Bet’s Sports Betting Director also shared that the site was to be personalised, so customers would find it easier to navigate. Plus, the digital real estate will be used more efficiently and as a result, the return will be much more significant.
Andy Walton, Head of Data at Sky Betting and Gaming, also emphasised the importance of the promotions and added that for the time being, they were able to fulfil complex rewards for more than 100,000 clients in 10 minutes instead of 24 hours. He also confirmed that in the foreseeable future these operations will be immediately processed.
In conclusion, he said that the chance to make real-time decisions was a fantastic opportunity and defined it as an important tool for achieving ongoing success and enhancing end-users’ experience.
- Author
Olivia Cole
