Upping the stakes: An interview with Bede Gaming's tech chief

Bede Gaming has appeared much more frequently in media headlines in recent weeks, with one of the biggest stories undoubtedly the acquisition of Bede-powered operator IPS by Swedish firm LeoVegas. As part of the deal, LeoVegas has agreed to maintain the IPS brands on the Bede casino platform and has hinted at the possibility of migrating its own operations further down the line.

Bede’s biggest coup to date has been hosting Rank’s portfolio of online brands and having had a major influence on the operator’s digital overhaul that drove its operating profits up 63% in 2016/17.

EGR Technology journeyed up to Newcastle to visit Bede HQ and chat to chief technology officer Alex Butcher about being the first on the cloud and how the supplier’s Rank migration had helped it “arrive to the table”.

EGR Technology: What does the technology behind the Bede platform look like?

Alex Butcher (AB): We’ve been building on the public cloud from day one, using Microsoft Azure for hosting. In the early days we thought it was going to be a challenge for some of the operators and regulators, but actually it’s opening up. We’ve had some fairly difficult conversations with regulators but we’ve actually gotten to the point now where everybody is reasonably happy with what’s there. Alderney, for example, require us to host game servers in Alderney, but the platform in general we’ve managed to host on the cloud.

We’re using .net as our technology, so C# .net and F# .net are the two languages of choice, with a bit of Node. Those are the three primary languages of tech. We use a mix of SQL Server and Cosmos DB for storage. Cosmos DB is a Microsoft Azure product; it’s their entry into the global database market. We’re also using things like Elastic and Kibana (open source data analytics search engine) and Prometheus for monitoring and alerting.

EGR Technology: Why did you choose Microsoft Azure?

AB: Because we were there first. We’ve been working on technology for a bit longer than we’ve been founded but it was available six years ago when we started looking around. At the time Google Cloud didn’t exist and AWS didn’t allow gambling, because as a US company they had a very conservative approach, so actually the only cloud available to us to partner with was Azure. As it happened, it’s worked out really well for us.

We run around 1,000 servers with Azure and were the first major gambling company with them, so the growth we’ve seen has given us a reasonable seat at the table in terms of how stuff happens. Within gambling we’re able to get quite good access meaning we’ve got proper account management and they’ve been good about giving us access to technical experts. We recently did a pitch in Toronto and Microsoft UK sent someone out with us for the entire week, so actually they are not just our datacentre, we’re partnering with them quite closely.

“We’re quite sticky as an employer and we’re low churn. We put people at the centre of the operation”

EGR Technology: How do you maintain scalability and the frequent spikes in traffic?

AB: A big part of it is horizontal scalability, so being architected on the cloud from day one means that we aren’t architected around the need for one big machine. We use microservices architecture. You’re probably hearing quite a lot about this now. There are lots of small services and each service is deployed on three or more machines. So that means when there are big spikes in traffic, which are reasonably predictable, we can just add more machines and we remove those machines when the traffic spikes go. It gives a good total cost of ownership without the need to provision more than you need. That’s what the cloud is best for, providing scalability with an unknown load.

EGR Technology: You’ve been at Bede for five years, what’s your career background?

AB: I’ve been doing this for around five years. Before this I ran an innovation consultancy in London and we sold hack days as a product. Prior to that I did a couple of years in Malawi doing some NGO stuff with my wife. Prior to that I was in fintech in investment banking, on synthetic derivatives and trading algorithms. I’ve brought a lot of that investment banking knowledge to this . In high-frequency areas there are a lot of similarities.

EGR Technology: What are some of the similarities between gaming and financial services?

AB: The challenge is in high-frequency transactions but with complete consistency required. Let’s say Argos’ homepage gets a million hits on Black Friday; if 500 of those web pages don’t load the customers can refresh and it’ll be fine, but if we do a million transactions and 500 of them lose a customer’s money then that’s a massive problem. So the thing they both share is high frequency and the requirement for perfect integrity of data. That’s the key fundamental thing, and a lot of the skill sets on the financial side will be common to what we do on the gambling side. Both are obviously operating in a regulated environment so transactions can be tracked, and who’s doing what.

EGR Technology: Do you tend to hire outside the industry when looking for staff?

AB: entirely outside the industry actually. We don’t have an industry to draw in; tombola is the only other big gaming company around here, over the river in Sunderland. Previous gaming experience is very important in our product department, but within technology what we want are engineers. We want people who are good team players and can work as part of the team to deliver the team goals.

Newcastle is a reasonable-sized city and Sage is headquartered just across the way. We hire quite young, typically those looking for their first or second job. We have an apprenticeship programme for testers and we’ve just started an internship for those in their final year of their course, to get some experience. In our office in Sofia they run a course at the local technical university and some of our staff lecture the course and we’ve used it as a fantastic recruitment tool. For us it’s a lot about profile. We’re quite sticky as an employer and we’re low churn. I think we’ve managed that by putting people at the centre of the operation.

Bede tends to hire outside the industry for its technology team

EGR Technology: How did Bede’s partnership with Rank impact you technically?

AB: From a technology point of view we had to learn to scale our products as Rank was four times the size of our second-biggest operator at the time. Learning to scale up to tier-one level was a key learning point. Also learning to deal with the number of different business units has been quite interesting. The big one has been adapting to their legacy estate. got so many different systems and the organisational complexity of a company across many offices in three or so countries .

The other one is retail. We weren’t used to bricks and mortar, and going out to a casino to see how our software would be used on site. The omni-channel challenge has been really exciting to get involved in. Someone can now get their membership card at a casino and open up their phone and log in with the same PIN and deposit. It’s been a fun one to get involved with in terms of technology challenges.

EGR Technology: How did the migration impact Bede?

AB: It was a very exciting time. The only thing that mattered to Bede was the success of Rank because demonstrating success at that level would demonstrate that we’d arrived at the table. People had even printed out signs saying ‘how can this help deliver Rank’ and stuck them around. I think it was because the MD and I ended up saying it so often it became a bit of a parody. But when you’ve got a singular goal everyone in the office gets behind it. As an organisation to deliver something at that scale was very hard for us.

EGR Technology: What technical complexities did you face during the process?

AB: One of the biggest challenges was adapting to deal with a distributed team where we had product owners and staff out in Gibraltar pushing requirements to staff over here. We did a lot of the platform migration and then later in the day we worked out how to integrate the digital operations team with the Bede team. It was less of a technical challenge than an organisational challenge I would say. The sheer size and amount of stuff they had on their website was a challenge. You’d think that only digital brands dealt with digital but actually Mecca and Grosvenor both have digital and retail.

“The thing finance and gaming both share is high frequency and the requirement for perfect integrity of data”

Also, time to market. Rank was quite early to market with digital. I think they had something like 3,000 little satellite marketing websites hanging around and that causes headaches, all the DNS and re-directs were quite painful. Most of the challenges we had to overcome were to the point of going live rather than post-live.

EGR Technology: What’s your stance on the age old ‘legacy platform versus third party provider’ argument?

AB: I think there are three strands: proprietary, taking a platform that’s proven at scale, or gambling on something that isn’t. On gambling something that isn’t, there are a number of small providers that aren’t supplying to major operators but you could take a punt on, and that’s what Rank did with Bede. And with a platform like OpenBet or Bede, you put those that are currently providing to tier one against proprietary and the reality is if you started a brand new operation tomorrow what are you going to be brilliant at? Are you going to assemble a team that are brilliant at gambling operations, at marketing concepts and at technology? The spend level to get to parity and to service at scale for technology is huge, so if you’re going to build a new venture should you start building the tech from scratch?

The short answer is no, and where you stand with the GVCs and bet365s is that they were building technology in the gold rush and they made a successful job of transitioning those early technology platforms to enterprise platforms. I think the most successful platforms in any market will always have elements of a proprietary build, but I would persuade new entrants away from thinking they can build from scratch and get to that level. The interesting one to watch is Sky Bet because they have hired a huge number of developers and are making a play to remove all the bits of supplier technology intake as much as possible. Watching how that plays out will answer the question of whether you can transition from one model to the other.