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Betfair: Taking no chances with technology

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 30 Nov 2004 16:40 GMT

I guess you can't be doing development all the time - there must be a trade-off with maintaining what you already have?
As a rough rule of thumb we spend about 50 percent of our time in engineering working on new features or enhancements to existing features. We then spend the remainder of the time working on the current site. That 50 percent might mean overhead for employees, such as holidays or training, but also working on the reliability of the infrastructure. If we fall behind on that maintenance then it could well become a panic later on.

You recently re-launched the site with a newly designed user interface. What are you doing to support other browsers now there is some competition again?
The Web is predominately dominated by IE users but we are starting to see more Firefox and Mozilla usage. The new site is compatible with non-IE browsers and Mac platforms, which we didn't support before. A lot of us use Firefox, which we find to be a much faster experience than IE.

And how about other client platforms such as mobile?
We have looked at other platforms in terms of mobile, television and so on and have developed a Teletext programme - a presentation-only version where you can see odds pop up. I think the real constraint on mobile devices is simply their interface; the Betfair application is really complex and if you try to do too much over a mobile application it probably won't work that well. I have had vendors come in and try to promote SMS-based betting where you'll text in the name of a team and send that off and we would send back the odds and then you send something back… I think it is frustrating enough to send a text. At the end of the day, if it's a good phone - why not just call us?

We actually do have a light version of the site which is HTML-only, only shows prices and runs on anything -- a phone, a Web-browser, a PDA. It is just a nice to have thing but isn't a significant portion of our traffic. We are looking to offer a transactional version of that. You won't be trading on that but if you happen to be on the way somewhere in your car it might be useful.

Earlier this year you announced that you were re-engineering the site around J2EE and abandoning .Net. How has that decision worked out for you?
We use J2EE for our server platform but all of our internal tools are still written in .Net. We made that conscious decision because we found that .Net is very good at rapid development for internal tools -- it's very robust. We chose J2EE for its stability and its enterprise class and that has certainly been a very good reason to go with the J2EE platform. But we will always use the best technology for our needs -- we are pretty technology-agnostic, unlike some businesses that might dictate or mandate one technology throughout.

You also use the open-source JBoss server as opposed to proprietary technology from IBM or BEA?
In terms of JBoss, we looked at application servers at the time; it was open source which has a lot of benefits. We think open source is the strong way to go. But we always look at new technologies and constantly evaluate if we need to switch to anything else. One of the real challenges of Betfair is that line between leading edge and bleeding edge. I think we have matured as a business to the point where we will not use bleeding-edge technology -- it's just too risky for us. We will tend to use things that are innovative and leading edge, but are tried and tested.