Pools CTO on the trials of migrating data and decommissioning on-premise systems
The Pools, formerly known as The Football Pools, last year underwent a rebranding and complete revamp of its technical infrastructure to modernise the historic UK betting group. It was a mammoth project, for which CTO Phillip Donegan and his team spent long nights migrating vast amounts of data to the cloud.
The Football Pools was first launched in 1923 in Liverpool and Manchester. At the time it was distributing 4,000 betting coupons outside Manchester United’s Old Trafford ground.
Essentially, players bet on a number of fixtures, with games scored on draws and wins, and gamblers are then entered into a draw to win prizes.
But after years of legacy technology slowing the operator down, it found processing player data had become extremely clunky and inefficient. In an effort to modernise and improve efficiencies, the operator took the decision to not just rebrand the product, but completely overhaul its digital systems.
Transitioning onto new platforms and migrating all player data onto the cloud, are two risky tasks that threaten a number of negative outcomes and, of course, lead to some amount of downtime for a product.
Migrating onto GiG platforms
But the task was necessary to revitalise the Pools’ product and match up to its new brand and personality.
“Our focus for the time being is to re-establish the Pools brand in the UK market and build success around our unique membership products that are new digital incarnations of the much-loved original Pools games, supplemented with exclusive free-to-play games and other membership benefits,” Pools CEO James Arnold says of the operator’s current focus, post-tech migration.
Reflecting back on the multi-month process, the Pools’ first step was to migrate onto GiG’s sportsbook and iGaming platform in January, transitioning off FSB Technology’s, which was acquired by EveryMatrix last year, and had its own technology completely scrapped and rebuilt as part of the integration into EveryMatrix’s operations.
GiG’s suite has enabled The Pools to adopt its bet-builder capabilities and dynamic odds. A key feature of the move was not just modernising The Pools systems, but also to provide scalability, as the operator looks to expand its European presence.
“[The GiG platform] really gives us a way of modernising the classic pools games and being able to play them digitally, which is, you know, absolutely key for the company going forward,” The Pools’ CTO Donegan tells iGB.
Consolidating years of duplicated historic player data
One of the The Pools’ more strenuous tasks was consolidating its historic player data into one system. As part of this, the digital team spent a number of months migrating decades of data onto Microsoft’s Azure public cloud system.
The point of the migration was to gain better insights into Pools players and better utilise their data.
“We did migrations to move them from on premise data centres into Azure so they were cheaper to run, but also higher performance, because it’ll just scale automatically as needed,” notes Donegan.
“We had lots of data spread across lots of disparate systems and disparate technologies at the same time. So player data could be held in an SQL Server, MySQL and Postgres Oracle,” Donegan says.
During this process Donegan’s team had to undergo a significant deduplication exercise, the process of identifying and removing duplicate data, that had built up over the years.
“We knew of all of our data, so we didn’t really have anything that was missing, but the main challenge was just connecting it all back together again. And you know, you could have potentially multiple accounts in multiple systems, so drawing all of that back together into a single account per player was the key to it,” Donegan noted.
New insights into player activity
The deduplication process had to be carried out before any data migration to the cloud could take place, as GIG’s platform does not allow for multiple accounts to exist at the same time, Donegan mentions.
“Compared to where we were, we’ve now got proper insights into what our players are doing. We can target them more effectively but more importantly playing engagement is a lot easier to do, because we can monitor it in real time,” said Donegan.
Also moved to the cloud was The Pools’ subscription engine, a massive piece of software, with 18 services operating within it. Donegan says the team is transferring those one by one onto Azure, to ultimately de-commission the on-premise technology that was previously used.
Decommissioning and updating legacy technology systems
As with any major digitisation strategies, some systems make the cut and others don’t.
The Pools was historically operated offline, with players being sent bits of paper to place their bets, which are then returned by post. And although the majority of its systems had been digitised, some products were ultimately decommissioned, due to outdated systems.
“There were various games that were powered by a system called Meridian that was written in VB (Visual Basic), an old version of VB, and it would have taken a significant amount of money to save it. Ultimately we decided it’s not worth it, we’re just going to decommission it,” Donegan said.
VB is a programming language developed by Microsoft. It’s used for creating various types of applications, especially those that run on the .NET platform.
Some systems adopted by The Pools have been rebuilt from the ground up, as is the case with the operator’s marketing system which has been redesigned using modern technology.
Its previous marketing system was written in Java, but Donegan’s team is looking to build the new system using the .NET Microsoft-developed software framework.
“We’re trying to move as much as possible onto .NET rather than spread across .NET, Ruby, VB and Java, which is what we were previously,” Donegan said.
But Donegan does want to reinstate some of the product’s classic games, in an updated format.
“A single payment provider is one of the things that we want to [adopt], which we see as part of the modernisation and restoration of some of the games that were removed from the site, but we want to add back again. So that’s the Premier Six, Premier Ten games, for example. The new marking engine being complete is a prerequisite to some of these services being put in first,” Donegan said.
The Pools’ AI integration
As part of The Pools’ modernisation efforts, it is also turning to AI technology to streamline both backend and customer-facing processes.
This year it began working with Intercom, an AI agent supplier, to provide it with customer-facing customer services chatbots. Currently, all player interactions go through human-operated agents, but this new system will enable the company to reduce that requirement and allow its customers to get quick responses to simple queries.
The Pools has also loaded all of its legal documents onto a Microsoft SharePoint site which has an AI co-pilot agent running that can scan hundreds of documents instantly. This allows its staff to send the agent queries, such as how much it is spending on certain services in a month.
“It just spits [information] back out to you in real time, rather than you having to trawl through hundreds, if not thousands, of documents. That was a couple of hours’ worth of work to create and you’ve got something that will save hundreds of hours across a year and it’s consumption based, so you’re only paying when you use it,” Donegan says.
Looking ahead to geographical expansion
Donegan tells iGB there is an “element of discovery” to the digitisation effort and the company will be reacting to new technical challenges as it evolves. But one of the core concerns on the technical transition is how players will respond to the new processes, especially those that have been long-time Pools users.
“How the player base responds to the new platform is going to be key. So it might be that we know we need to add new features to the product roadmap in order to satisfy demand. I think reactivity is going to be a key challenge over the next 12 months,” Donegan said.
While The Pools is predominantly focusing its rebrand and digital launch in the UK, Arnold is eyeing further geographical expansion and the recent tech and product overhaul will be able to support that goal and ensure The Pools can compete with its global peers.
“The small stake, big win nature of the games is perfect for many rapidly expanding markets, particularly across Africa, Latin and South America, where we are actively in discussion with several third parties about future growth opportunities,” Arnold concludes.