Match made in heaven as Xanadu lands €2.5m deal

Cork company Xanadu Consultancy has landed a deal worth millions of euro to “future proof” one of the world’s leading online betting exchanges.

The global gaming technology services provider has been awarded a €2.5m contract to enhance Matchbook.com’s betting exchange platform.

The Channel Island-headquartered betting company has turned to Xanadu to deliver a comprehensive re-architecture of its sports trading platform to provide a faster and more efficient trading exchange.

The driving force behind the deal is Matchbook’s desire to increase capacity to accommodate further growth in the coming years.

“We want to future-proof the trading platform so that as activity on the site scales [up] due to the exchange’s popularity, Matchbook.com can continue to provide a resilient and reliable exchange that has the capacity to transact thousands of bets every second, processing massive amounts of data effectively for our sports traders,” Matcbook.com spokesperson, Roibeard Long said.

Far from taking a punt on Blackpool-based Xanadu, the two companies have been working together for a number of years with much of the Irish technology company’s growth attributable to those existing links.

The Xanadu team has already started work on an in-memory, event-driven architecture for Matchbook.com which it says will lead to unprecedented levels of performance and scalability.

“Xanadu already has a deep understanding of the betting exchange market with a number of clients in this area,” said Xanadu chief technology officer, Marvin Sanderson.

“This type of project is ideal for our team. We know that the faster the exchange, the more bets that can be processed.”

Xanadu announced in November that it was to take on 120 new staff across a variety of roles, to be based at its headquarters in Blackpool on the outskirts of Cork city. The jobs – which the company is recruiting to fill – are across marketing, programming and data analytics.

The need for additional staff arose from increasing demand for their services including research and development of emerging software and the maintenance and upgrade of existing software and hardware systems.