Product Development Increases User Base

Product Development Increases User Base

Industry: iGaming
Client since: 2014
Services used
Application Development
Technologies used
iGaming

Background

The gambling and betting sector in the UK is a fluid and dynamic business, with new competitive entries each year. The fiercely competitive industry of fickle users and intense regulatory pressure puts extra stress on major players in the category.

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Client

The Ladbrokes Coral Group, part of GVC Holdings, is one of the largest online betting and gambling companies in the world. As part of an FTSE 100 global organization, the ability for the Ladbrokes Coral platform to sustain and build its market position demands a digital platform that can continue to outperform competitors and engage new users.

Challenge

When Ladbrokes Coral approached Symphony Solutions, they were procuring applications from vendors and integrating them to try to create a harmonious mobile / desktop solution.

This type of product development carried distinct disadvantages for them, primarily:
  • Dependence on vendors to innovate and release new features based on vendor priorities
  • Inability to distinguish Coral product offerings from competitive entries, restricting brand recognition and business growth
  • Heterogeneous mobile / desktop solutions, along with inherent performance challenges
  • Unstable architecture
Ladbrokes Coral realized they needed to build a better product and to gain control over product engineering capability and priorities, in effect to:
  1. Innovate more effectively in a competitive market
  2. Build a strategic partnership with a trusted supplier
  3. Bring Lean and Agile principles to the teams
  4. Reduce engineering costs while retaining quality
  5. Own their own Intellectual Property
  6. Achieve consistency across development and release processes
  7. 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
  • be fully integrated into the product team

“To actually build a sportsbook within a year when they knew nothing about it was phenomenal. Anyone in the industry would say that’s impossible to achieve with an outsourced company.”

Head of Sportsbook Architecture, Ladbrokes Coral

Solution

Symphony Solutions helped Ladbrokes Coral build a better product using AWS based solutions.
Here’s how:
Symphony Solutions’ does the front-end web development and middleware as part of our custom software development services for applications which Ladbrokes Coral then owns and offers to users.

Symphony quickly became part of the Ladbrokes Coral team and built native applications for Android and iOS within our mobile application development services to allow users to bet and play from any device.

Symphony Solutions developed microservices data aggregation.

Symphony built a new 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 coalition group as part of our Agile transformation consultancy have helped ensure that the Ladbrokes Coral platform has the speed, flexibility, and predictability to stand toe to toe with competition.

“Working with Symphony has resulted in reduced yearly costs. They’re able to adapt to deliver high-quality work despite challenging conditions .  .  .  overall they’re an indispensable partner.” 

Result

Ladbrokes Coral has a product which is consistently among the top on the market, specifically:
  • User base has expanded worldwide
  • Revenue share has increased
  • Owning intellectual property gives control
  • Partnership with Symphony Solutions grew from a small team of engineers to an Offshore Development Center of 200 engineers
  • Agile principles and Scrum methodology increased efficiency on all levels
  • The work continues to grow

“We have better engagement within our business because of the quality of the product they are delivering.”

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