Sky Betting and Gaming Turns to Cloudera to Provide Real-time Capabilities for Thousands of Staff and Punters in the UK

Sky Betting and Gaming Turns to Cloudera to Provide Real-time Capabilities for Thousands of Staff and Punters in the UK

LONDON, England, August 17, 2016 — Cloudera, the global provider of the fastest, easiest, and most secure data management and analytics platform built on Apache Hadoop and the latest open source technologies, today announced that it is working with one of the biggest online gaming companies in the UK, Sky Betting and Gaming, to deliver real-time services and targeted promotions that are improving the experience for tens of thousands of gamers and sporting punters across the country.

In the popular and crowded space of online gaming and sports betting, differentiation from the competition and keeping customers engaged is the ultimate goal. To achieve this, continually evolving and offering new services as points of difference is paramount, and Sky Betting and Gaming is using Cloudera Enterprise to deliver real-time services and targeted promotions that improve the user experience, differentiate the brand in a busy marketplace, and critically, increase revenue.

When Sky Betting and Gaming first came to market, it shared an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) with its parent company. However, as Sky Betting and Gaming grew, executives recognised that a traditional EDW platform could not provide the scalability and performance the company needed to support its dynamic business requirements. While many companies seek to complement an EDW environment with an Apache Hadoop-based platform, Sky Betting and Gaming replaced its EDW with a Hadoop environment using Cloudera Enterprise.

Sky Betting and Gaming now easily integrates a wide-range of data into the platform and shares the data with downstream systems, including customer relationship management (CRM) and decision support systems. In addition to pure transactional data, Cloudera’s technology allows Sky Betting and Gaming to ingest behavioural data, (such as web analytics) and third-party data sets, (like market pricing data), to improve machine-learning accuracy and expose richer data sets.

“Promotions are massively important to our customers, and for our business, so we needed to deliver a better experience from our customers’ point of view,” said Andy Walton, Head of Data, Sky Betting and Gaming. “We can now calculate and fulfill complex rewards for over 100,000 customers in around 10 minutes instead of next day, and we’ll soon move to a world in which we process these transactions in seconds.”

“With the ability to also assess key marketing opportunities in real-time, including propensity to buy, cross-sale opportunities, and customer value, there will be even more opportunities to improve the end-user experience. The ability to make decisions in real-time is a massive opportunity, and key to our ongoing success,” added Walton.

There’s a lot of money at stake in online gaming and sports betting, and a fast and scalable analytics environment helps Sky Betting and Gaming to closely monitor its liabilities and effectively manage its risk.

“One of our first use cases was to help our trading department better understand our liabilities at any point in time,” said Walton. “When it comes to understanding our risk, there are a huge number of permutations, but with the processing power of the Cloudera platform, we can run through different combinations of outcomes and give our trading department insight that simply wasn’t possible with our previous warehouse.”

The platform’s flexibility enables staff to conduct both batch and real-time processing, and advanced analytics on the data as needed. For example, real-time data processing is the enabler for processing money-back promotions even faster. “We can respond to what’s happening in real-time and so really improve customer satisfaction. Sky Betting and Gaming’s analytics and BI teams can also conduct ad-hoc queries on the data far faster than before, and change parameters to uncover business trends and patterns,” Walton finished.

“Sky Betting and Gaming is a fast moving e-commerce business and its customers typically interact with its products many times each day, so it needed a data pipeline that could run magnitudes faster and support real-time calculations.

“With the legacy EDW, it had to wait until midnight each day to process the data, and because it was a big batch, it would often take hours to process, so it was always working with old data. Now Sky Betting and Gaming has access to real-time, rich data sets, and this is helping it bring more bespoke, relevant offers to its customers, and as a direct result, it is increasing revenues and reducing churn rates too,” added David Pieterse, vice president, EMEA at Cloudera.

About Sky Betting and Gaming

Sky Betting and Gaming (Sky Bet) is owned by CVC Capital Partners (80 percent) and Sky (20 percent), and is one of the biggest online gaming companies in the UK, based on both customer volumes and revenue. Millions of people use Sky Bet to bet on sporting events across thousands of markets, including football and horse racing, and to also play poker, casino, and bingo games.

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