Today, I’m excited that Entain plc, a FTSE 100 company and world leader in sports betting and gaming, is officially a Syntropy customer. Entain’s properties and brands are among some of the most familiar in the industry: bwin, Ladbrokes, PartyPoker, and of course BetMGM (a joint venture with MGM Resorts International).
When we first started talking to Entain in 2021, it was clear that their team was different from many other IT organizations. Because of the “always-on” nature of Entain’s business, 24/7 reliability is the expectation. Customers expect to be able to interact with Entain’s services all of the time, globally. Additionally, regulatory requirements mean Entain has to localize its infrastructure in many different municipalities, states, or countries based on the local laws. Mission-critical applications multiplied by infrastructure complexity are precisely the problem that Syntropy was built to solve.
At first glance, it's easy to look at Entain as "an app" or "a website" because that's how consumers interact with it. But underlying this simplicity is tremendous complexity. Sports betting has evolved from a relatively simple one-time transaction (before the game) to a constantly changing market where prices change dynamically (throughout the game). Indeed, Entain's infrastructure rivals any modern stock exchange, with more transactions on a typical day than Amazon has on Black Friday - 71,000 events per minute.
Simplicity for the end-user is the goal, so all transactions from your device to Entain’s global infrastructure need to be seamless and fast. We all know how frustrating it can be when an app or website doesn’t work properly. Plenty of data shows how increasing the time to complete a transaction results in user abandonment and lower customer satisfaction. Entain lives this every second of the day, and their infrastructure is built to handle it.
I won’t reiterate every point from the Entain Case Study. Still, I did want to highlight that Entain discovered two advantages to using Syntropy - firstly, and most significantly, Syntropy protects against core internet outages. In one case, our DARP protocol found a faster way around a congested link. Intermittent congestion can cause outage-like scenarios, where an application cannot complete a transaction in time, and it looks like an outage to the end-user. Syntropy finds the fastest path, even if it’s not the preferred path by the internet. Secondly, Syntropy reduces latency even in normal conditions. There are many great data points about how Entain could use Syntropy to get better-performing connectivity between data centers even in non-failure situations.
From the time we started working with the Entain team, I was incredibly impressed by how self-sufficient the team was. Syntropy is a brand new product for the Entain network team, and they jumped in with both feet and had the platform up and running with limited engagement from our technical team in just a few days. They could add additional sites quickly - often in just an afternoon. But more importantly, the Entain team provided exceptional partnership to Syntropy by giving honest and direct feedback that allowed our technical team to enhance the Syntropy product and make it easier to use and more reliable for Entain’s specific use case.
We’re looking forward to what the next several years will bring, and we look forward to more collaboration with our newest customer.
