A Large Gambling and Sports Betting Company Works With Symphony Solutions [Case Study]

BACKGROUND

The gambling and betting sector in the UK is a dynamic and growing business, with new competitive entries each year. It has now become a fiercely competitive industry of fickle users, regulatory pressure, and an increasing user base.

Online betting apps and sports gambling apps are now widely used, so that users can bet from any of their personal devices, contributing to global expansion to $52 Billion in 2018. This is expected to reach $60 Billion by 2020 (Statista research) and $128 Billion by 2026 (Transparency Market Research).

CLIENT

As one of the UK’s largest bookmakers, Coral, is a household name with a visible presence on every high street in the country. Having a digital platform that can perform to these high expectations is essential.

As of March 2018, the Ladbrokes Coral Group was acquired by GVC Holdings, making the brand a key part of the world’s largest online betting and gaming company. As part of an FTSE 100 global organization, the ability for the Coral platform to go up against its competitors in the UK ‘s highly regulated market is more important than ever.

PROBLEM

When Coral approached Symphony Solutions, they were procuring applications from partners and integrating them to provide a harmonious, though disparate, mobile/desktop solution.

The disadvantages with the approach were:

• Dependence upon vendors to innovate and release new features based upon the vendors’ roadmap priorities.
• Inability to differentiate their product offerings from their competitors; hence, restricting the ability to grow the business more effectively.
• Heterogeneous mobile/desktop solution, along with inherent performance challenges.

Coral needed to:

1. Gain control over product engineering capability and priorities.

2. Innovate more effectively in a competitive market.

3. Build a strategic partnership with a trusted supplier.

4. Build an engineering team that would:
– deliver Coral’s defined product and architectural roadmaps for a multi-brand solution;
– work collaboratively with the Coral Product and Architecture team;
– work to Coral’s defined lean Agile development processes;
– work to Coral’s preferred usage of the Scalable Agile Framework (SAFe) – we have now taken this approach and implemented it across a number of our clients;
– be fully integrated into the product team to provide a more collaborative approach to product development.

5. Reduce engineering costs while not compromising on quality.

6. Own their own Intellectual Property.

7. Achieve consistency across development and release processes

SOLUTION

Symphony Solutions builds the front end and middleware for applications which Coral then owns and offers to users.

Symphony quickly became part of the extended Coral team and developed a web platform and native Android and iOS apps to allow users to bet and play from any device. Additionally, Symphony built the architecture to support the dynamics of real-time betting, scaling up and back for increased high load during major sporting events like the Olympics or World Cup.

Finally, the combination of Coral’s Agile, CI/CD, DevOps and SAFe approaches to development and the Symphony Agile coaching team have helped to ensure that the Coral platform has the speed, flexibility and predictability to stand toe to toe with the competition.

RESULTS

Coral has become more efficient on all levels, they own their own applications, have greater control, and have expanded their partnership with Symphony from a small team of engineers to over 150.

The work continues to grow.