William Hill CIO: Victor Kemeny

AM: FTSE 100 company William Hill is the UK's largest bookmaker with annual revenues of 8.3bn pounds. But the industry it competes in has been transformed by the internet. While high street betting shops are still a core part of its business, punters are increasingly moving online, using various interactive digital channels. It's an industry where standing stills simply isn't an option and innovation and speed to market are crucial. Silicon.com caught up with William Hill IT director, Victor Kemeny.

AM: Victor, just how much of an impact has the internet had on William Hill's business?

VK: The internet has changed the dynamics of the game. When it came along, there wasn't much belief that people would want to bet on the internet and we thought if we could make 50,000 a year we'd actually have a massive product there. Now we're launching Arcade Game and that can make potentially between 20 and 50,000 pounds a week.

AM: Expanding William Hill's multi-channel betting offerings is key to the company's future growth strategy. What kind of innovations are you looking at there in the future?

VK: I think there's going to be more product - so providing more and more opportunities for punters to bet on. So it'll be more ball by ball in-running stuff so, how many minutes before the next goal's going to be scored? How many kicks of the ball before the next throw-in, how many corners in the match, and the ultimate for us is a penalty is given is it going to be a miss, a save or a goal. Yes or No? For that sort of market you've got 30 seconds to create and take the bets. It'll only be a small market but it'll be lots of smaller products but lots more of them.

AM: The whole Web 2.0 phenomenon will undoubtedly have a huge impact on those businesses with a high use of digital and online channels. What are you doing to prepare for that?

VK: The best thing to do there is leave it in the hands of the software vendors. We'll let the software vendors come up with the tools and at the appropriate time, we'll upgrade as required

AM: So do you ever foresee a day when the high street betting shops will be made redundant by these new technologies?

VK: No. I think what you'll find is you have different types of people using different types of channel. Some people prefer the telephone, some people want a more anonymous interaction through the internet and other people want the social event of actually going into the shop, knowing the people there and having a good social experience.

AM: And presumably, you'll be putting lots of new technology into the high street betting shops

VK: Well, we've recently just completed an electronic point of sale roll-out. Up until two years ago the technology in the shop was very, very limited, in fact all the bets were settled manually. The introduction of that technology has enabled the staff to spend more time with the customers and actually focus on customer service.

AM: As more of your customers interact with you over the internet, that inevitably raises questions over security. Indeed 18 months ago online bookmakers in the UK were targeted by criminal gangs, blackmailing them using denial of service attacks. How do you mitigate against that kind of threat?

VK: Not one of the areas that we really like talking about in public. I mean, if you set up and say yes, we'll do this or that then it actually gives the bad guys an opportunity to come and have a go at you. The way I look at it is, when talking to MET police and people like that, they've said we have to be lucky 100% of the time, whereas the bad guys only have only got to be lucky once. We had a DOS attack, a denial of service attack, six or nine months ago and we actually just rode it out. So for over 48 hours, we let the DOS attack run. We were still able to trade business but we were able to mitigate that by some of the activities that we undertook.

AM: So does it just become a technological arms race against these well-funded, organised criminal gangs?

VK: At some point, they will get through and the trick is, when they get through, find out how they've got through and make sure you put as broad a spectrum defence in so that variations on the theme won't get through again.

AM: You've just embarked on a three year project to replace William Hill's ageing legacy IT, parts of which date back to 1982. Has this old IT hindered William Hill's ability to respond to this fast changing industry and what kinds of new things are you looking to replace it with?

VK: Up until about three or four years ago, it didn't constrain the business. However, over the last couple of years, it's restricted our ability to respond to market trends. We haven't been able to get product into market quick enough. What we're intending to do is deliver a more agile platform that will enable us to get to market quicker and actually provide us with a scalability, both horizontally and vertically, that actually means, that as the business grows, depending on what channel it grows in, we can actually scale the infrastructure appropriately.

AM: So how challenging was the IT integration following William Hill's 504m acquisition of Stanley Leisure's 624 betting shops?

VK: That was not such a big technology challenge - it was more of a logistics challenge. Very early on, we took the decision that we would actually put the same technology that we'd just finished rolling out in our own shops into the Stanley shops. So we had a single technology platform across of the whole retail estate. I think that was one of our better decisions that we've made which means that actually, in the retail space, we have a consistent offering, a consistent product and therefore when we come to upgrade it in the future, we have a single service solution that we have to migrate on.

AM: Because so much of your business is now not only reliant on, but driven by technology, is there an onus for a lot of the innovation come out of the IT department and how hands-on is the rest of the board and the chief executive with this?

VK: I'm very lucky in that I've got a chief exec that really does understand the technology that we're trying to use and exploit. And one of the challenges over the last couple of years has been to actually help the other members of the board understand what technology can do for our organisation. And we actually have joint teams. We have a joint retail team, we have a joint gaming team, we have a joint remote sportsbook team - and they all work - and it's a mixture of marketeers, technologists, operations people, finance people working in a single team to deliver that technology and that solution.

AM: And finally, what are the future technology challenges that you are looking to address?

VK: The two challenges, I think, for someone like William Hill, is going to be compliance - so if you look at the Gambling Bill in the UK, and the impact that will have on our business, in terms of how we'll have to track our business and how much data we're going to store plus legislation in other countries in terms of what we can and can't do and compliance to those. And I think that in terms of looking on the positive side, I think it's going to be what happens in the mobile arena, as mobile channel expands, there's going to be more and more opportunity to get product to the punter in the mobile device.

AM: Victor Kemeny, thank you.