Erlang Solutions is sponsoring Betting on Sports 2017, the second edition of the largest international sports and betting trade conference at Olympia Conference Centre in Kensington.
Ahead of the 12-15 September event, we spoke to the company’s CEO Stuart Whitfield about what he is looking forward to at #boscon2017, his perfect sporting event, and which sports betting partnership has stood out over the last 12 months.
SBC: What are you looking forward to at Betting on Sports?
SW: I’m most looking forward to seeing Chandru Mullaparthi’s talk on building the ideal betting stack on Wednesday afternoon. There are many ways to put a betting stack together, but Chandru, with his experience as head of software architecture at bet365, is uniquely placed to suggest the best. Obviously, I’m intrigued to learn how he sees Erlang, and its strengths in scalability, reliability and concurrency, slot into the ideal betting stack.
Flicking through the agenda, Wednesday’s Innovation in Betting stream jumped out at me. As an Erlang consultancy, we live and breathe innovation in the industry. I’m looking forward to hearing the speakers’ perceptions of how different operators are moving away from their legacy systems, and the different approaches they take when doing so.
SBC: What are you promoting at Betting on Sports?
SW: Rock solid reliability, super-high concurrency, and ultra-scalability. All via the open source BEAM virtual machine, on which Erlang and Elixir languages operate.
BEAM is a beacon of reliability, scalability, and concurrency. It’s highly optimised for real time, massively concurrent and transactional systems. If there is a demand for these systems, BEAM, and Erlang and Elixir, will continue to have an upward trajectory, especially in telecoms, messaging, online betting, and IoT.
While consumers are always on, so are their service providers; always evolving and deploying something new whilst maintaining uptime and service levels. High level programming languages like Erlang and Elixir allow development teams to refactor the code and move it around painlessly.
It’s because of this that Erlang and Elixir have seen adoption by businesses with very large volumes of concurrent, active users who transact a massive amount of data in real-time, such as bet365, Sky Bet, Machine Zone (the people behind The Game of War), Klarna, Vocalink (the UK payment infrastructure provider, recently bought by Mastercard), and EE.
For example, we are constantly in conversations with companies who have depended on Ruby- or Java-based tech stacks, but want to exploit BEAM’s power to reduce their operational, server and infrastructure costs.
We are also experts in the industry leading message queuing broker, RabbitMQ, and in a highly scalable open source messaging solution, MongooseIM, used by many of our customers in high volume B2C applications.
SBC: What sports betting partnership has stood out in the past 12 months?
SW: I would highlight some of the great work Erlang Solutions has been doing in sports betting. We’ve enjoyed a close relationship with bet365 for a few years now, and it’s still going strong.
Others for whom we work include Derivco, Betsson and William Hill and many other partnerships that remain confidential. We’re doing some exciting work in concurrency, scalability and availability in the industry and in distributed systems generally. Watch this space!
SBC: Describe your perfect sporting event
SW: My twin sons (who will soon be 17) playing for England in the 2023 Rugby world cup! Before then, watching the 2019 world cup with them in Japan.
