As someone in charge of a 24/7 business which lives or dies by the quality of its software, do you have any strong views on whether open source is an inherently more robust way to develop?
One of the main complaints about open source is the lack of support behind it, but I don't actually think that is an issue. What we have found in the open-source community, particularly with JBoss, is that the support from the community and JBoss themselves is as good as what you'd get with a commercial vendor. Our decisions are going to be more around price-performance and value, and obviously open source has price advantage. We use Oracle as our database, which is very robust but certainly not free and not inexpensive but for us its quality makes for a good price performance.
How many developers do you have in-house?
About 30 developers and roughly a similar number of QAs (quality assurance) so altogether the number of people developing our software is about 50 people. The engineering team is about 140, which is made up of our infrastructure team, our 24/7 support team, business analysts, product managers and overhead like me.
We try to keep a ratio of two developers to one QA person, which is probably a better ratio than many customers but that is probably just the nature of us being a very transactional site.
What have been the most difficult skills to find?
We find them all to be very difficult. Betfair tends to be very selective – we spend more time evaluating people than technology. We are very, very picky when it comes to selecting our team so as a result we don't have very much unwanted attrition but it does take us a long time to hire. We have always had open headcount but we have never been able to fill all the seats as we can't find good enough people. I think technical QA people have been extremely hard to find for us, people who can really stress test the system.
We are finding that there is a lot more stability in terms of the service platform itself. We have also seen considerable improvements in scalability. I think some people have misunderstood the migration and see it as an IT-driven project. There are certainly IT benefits in terms of stability and capacity and so on but ultimately it is a product enhancement as it allows us to roll out a new interface, it allows us to roll out co-brands much more rapidly – in fact just before going live we rolled out a Ritz Casino co-brand. We are also able to manage multiple languages much more easily.
If it was an IT-driven decision then we would probably have made other changes first, we would probably have made some database changes. We launched the new site on the 13 December.
That was all done with in-house expertise?
We have brought in contractors in the past to augment the team we have here but we have not outsourced any work. The main reason for that is predominantly because the underlying engine that we have here, which processes hundreds of millions of pounds a week, is a financial system that quite honestly is not something that we would feel comfortable risking to a third party. Maybe over time we might feel comfortable trusting a third party with more user interface and presentation things but nothing in the core betting product. We think that is strategically important to us and proprietary.
We do have a Betfair developers programme which is for all intents and purposes an API we have developed so external third parties and other ISVs can develop applications on top of the API.
Talkback
Do you only interview arrogant people?