Whether it’s boxing gloves, bicycles or betting odds, competitors can be given identical resources, yet one will always gain the upper hand.
This thought came to me at the 2015 TIBCO NOW Tour, when Einar Knobel—the CEO of TXODDS—was explaining his business model. His company specializes in supplying real-time and historical betting odds to anyone who wants them. It doesn’t matter whether the client is a bookmaker or a betting syndicate, they are given identical information at the same time. Their success results from what they then do with the information and the speed with which they do it.
Needless to say, the company’s 15-year journey eventually brought it into contact with TIBCO and, especially, StreamBase, which enables its clients to build applications rapidly that can analyze and act on real-time streaming data. In TXODDS’ case, the data is not only live data from every imaginable betting odds source (football in its case), but also from its own 15-year historical odds comparison files and other information sources parsed then fed in by its own human analysts.
The end result is an astonishing amount of high-value and relevant knowledge delivered to paying clients within moments of its creation. TIBCO is truly helping TXODDS stay ahead of the game—and, for TXODDS’ customers to stay in the forefront of theirs.
Perhaps a bit of background would be of interest. Fifteen years ago, Einar Knobel was a football fan who worked in a betting shop. He also liked to gamble. He had a friend, a programming wizard, who had written some odds comparison software. They both knew the internet was going to become important and saw this as a chance to turn their common interests and their growing odds database into a viable business, delivering their information to “professional punters” and betting business operators through the internet. That was about it as far as business plans were concerned, but this soon changed when they realized they’d hit on an extremely valuable service.
At first, they tried to give their data away for nothing while earning revenue from advertising. This was never going to prove a sustainable model. Then they added a paid subscription layer, which was a lot better. But, everything changed when they focused hard on how best to deliver this valuable information. They chose an API model, which meant that clients could immediately integrate the TXODDS feed with their own processing systems. For this to be successful, they needed a supplier which could be completely trusted to deliver the right information in real time.
By then, the market was exploding. The data collections, the platforms, the data volumes and the feeds to customers were all getting bigger. They needed to find a way to make the processes more efficient. The company’s very smart internal techies advocated TIBCO StreamBase as the very best way to achieve their aims and scale into the future. A measure of its success is that the company now has two data centers—one in the UK and one in Asia (a huge market), and is on the verge of opening a third, deep in an unnamed European mountain.
Einar Knobel is doing a grand job as the ringmaster, gathering around him highly talented technical people who also share his passion for the business. He runs a flat organization, which means that not only does everyone have a voice, but they are listened to.
How else could he have ended up selecting StreamBase?
