Sunday, October 30, 2011 : NEW I.T. THINKING AT ONLINE GAMBLING SITE
Bet365's IT chief shares his thoughts on expansion
One of the interesting IT stories to emerge this week appeared in the technical publication ComputerWeek UK, where the top IT man at online gambling group bet365 discussed his plans to expand staffing to cope with the significant increases in transactions and traffic at the website.
CTO Martin Davies told the publication that he is recruiting for a fresh specialist team of software developers and network architects to build the online gambling company a more efficient IT platform for the future, and he'll be looking for techies with open minds to encourage true innovation.
The new team is to work as a separate unit developing plans for the future, whilst the existing personnel keep the booming bet365 machine on track and running smoothly.
“We are looking for people that can come and look at the way we do things at the moment with an open mind," said Davies. “We want to have people not constrained by one piece of software. We are looking for people who look at a problem and say what do I need to solve the problem? We want the best way of solving the problem, rather than what they already know,” he said.
The main problem challenging Davies' innovative ambitions appears to be how to make software run faster and more efficiently on hardware with increasing processing power.
The traditional way of writing software, based on the multi-threading model, does not scale efficiently, Davies told ComputerWeek.
“We currently have computers with 80 CPU cores and next year we will have 160 CPU cores. The issue is the software isn’t going quicker because you have more CPUs. You have to change the way you write the software,” he explained.
Solutions may involve exploring new software languages like Scala and Akka, and ways of writing software to enable this, but Davies is additionally considering the company's needs in the hardware area, and is looking for techies expert in hardware architecture, in order to evaluate and possibly develop new platforms.
Davies revealed that last year alone bet365 invested GBP 60 million on IT.