TXODDS supplies real-time betting data to the betting industry. “Our clients are betting professionals, very big operators—could be governments—and sports bodies that want to monitor bets,” says CEO Einar Knobel. “There’s been an explosion in real-time data, led by in-running, or betting during the game. We’re meeting the demand by collecting everything that’s going on in an industry that’s exploding. Our goals are to be an innovator and an enabler to companies by supplying the full scale of data.”

Says Alex Kozlenkov, chief architect: “My objective was to modernize the company to prepare it for the potentially fearsome world of betting, one much like the financial industry in which there is almost a form of warfare going on. To prepare, we absolutely had to modernize our technology and bring it into the new age.

“The challenges were legacy systems, primarily relational databases that made it very difficult to expediently send data to customers. Our goal was to deliver data something like the finance industry, but our situation is more difficult because betting operates 24 by 7 globally. The data is so huge that delivering it all is almost meaningless. Rather, you need to deliver data that is both timely and relevant.”

“We began the relationship with TIBCO a couple of years ago,” says Mr. Knobel. “We were looking for a development platform partner for our next best-of-breed services. We looked at the financial industry because it’s where we wanted the betting market to go, and TIBCO kept showing up.”

The TIBCO Streaming system allowed us to streamline our operations in a way that we could combine different types of data very effectively and make it possible for customers to selectively consume it, increasing its relevance," says Mr. Kozlenkov. "We've simplified our whole product portfolio, so instead of dealing with two feeds, we have one unified source."

Customer Time Savings
“Instead of customers having to ingest all the data, we integrate it in real time in the TIBCO platform, and very quickly deliver what would usually be an internal process on the client side,” says Knobel. “Clients can spend less time developing, and their trading floor staff can manage more transactions and more markets simultaneously. Their staff becomes more efficient. They don’t have to deal with lots of multiple feeds of varying quality. We provide a fast, reliable feed with enhanced features.

Fast Innovation
“Speed of innovation is now much quicker using the TIBCO platform. We could have an idea, go into testing, and have a new product within a couple of days. Previously, you’d have to develop a process for just the data, stage it, test it, then run processes on that, and then go to the client and explain what they have to do on their side. But with TIBCO, we can just offer it. It’s a perfect concept, already a deliverable.

Reliable, Relevant Data
“TIBCO technology has helped us automate data integration and disseminate information that is trustworthy, reliable, and timely,” says Kozlenkov. “The betting industry is not just systems. It’s plays on the pitch and referees. It’s not only people placing bets, it’s federations and government organizations. This information needs to be reliable. The outcome of a match in some obscure college league might be suspicious. The names of the teams are potentially ambiguous. It’s of utmost importance to have outcomes certified and verified. And all of this work has to be done by technology because it’s impossible to do it manually.”

“Our customers don’t have to think about how we’re collecting it all, how we’re serving it,” says Knobel. “They get just the specific data they want on specific events, and get it faster.”

Customer Profitability
“The key operational improvement we’ve made with TIBCO is drastic reduction in latency,” continues Mr. Knobel. “A lot of our European clients are interested in what’s happening in Asia and want information as quickly as possible. Everything is now real time in-memory, and we can very quickly push data to Asian clients, or to Europe, without going through any databases.

“By merging and streaming all the data on our platform, real-time and historical, customers can model, study patterns, and formulate their trading plans. They increase profitability—and that’s what it’s all about.”

What's next is visualizations of real-time data and historical reporting using the TIBCO Streaming system. We're sitting on a big gold mine in terms of historical data. We need to go there, and TIBCO is helping us with all the components."