Platform Symphony to improve speed of services and deliver opportunity for growth

LONDON, Dec. 7 -- Platform Computing, the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software, today announced that Sporting Index, world leaders in sports spread betting, has selected Platform Symphony for high-performance grid computing. The company is using Platform Symphony grid management software to increase the volume of transactions and event updates that it is able to handle, and in doing so underpin its expansion plans.

Sporting Index is experiencing significant growth in bet numbers, and with the rapid rate of partner sign-ups to its betting services business, Sporting Solutions, it is relying on Platform Symphony's scheduling to increase server utilisation and keep a control on costs.

 "With circa four out of five sports spread bets placed in the UK coming through our systems, our core requirements have risen from around 300 to over 3,000 prices published per second," says Eachan Fletcher, Sporting Index's CIO. "The growth that we're experiencing in our B2B business is pushing up the number of sports and markets we need to cater for, and Platform's grid computing technology is a great way for Sporting Index to scale up. Platform has helped us customise some of the grid components we're using, on time and within budget so we can deliver the highest possible level of service to our customers."

"As i-gaming becomes more popular and customers demand experiences such as 'live in-play' betting, the amount of compute-power that organisations such as Sporting Index require is increasing dramatically," said Jim Mancuso, general manager of financial services at Platform Computing. "This is why we are seeing more online companies demand higher usage of existing computing resources through optimised work-load scheduling. Increasingly, we see i-gaming companies architecting for grid and cloud computing to support their virtualization and business simulation initiatives."

Platform's flagship financial industry solution, Platform Symphony underpins core risk and analytics systems for the largest investment banks and other financial institutions around the world. By managing grids composed of thousands of CPUs and optimising the application workloads across shared resource pools, IT departments are better able to support multiple lines of business in response to business priority. By using Platform Symphony, organisations can model pricing algorithms with more fidelity against a broader set of risk factors. This increase in modeling capacity allows firms to have high confidence in their quantification of risk.

About Sporting Index and Sporting Solutions

Sporting Index is the world's only dedicated sports and event spread betting company. It is the undisputed market leader with an estimated market share of over 70 percent. It offers spread bets on a wide variety of sports, political events such as the General Election and popular reality TV shows, as well as a portfolio of unique virtual games. Sporting Index is authorized and regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA). Visit www.sportingindex.com.

Sporting Solutions, the trading name of the betting services division of Sporting Index, provides operators in the betting industry with high quality pricing data, both pre-event and in-play. This revolutionary wholesale service combines the expertise of Sporting Index's highly regarded traders, sophisticated proprietary models and technological advancements in data delivery to provide enhanced pricing capabilities to the global betting and gaming industry.

About Platform Computing

Platform Computing is the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software -- serving more than 2,000 of the world's most demanding organizations. For 17 years, our workload and resource management solutions have delivered IT responsiveness and lower costs for enterprise and HPC applications. Platform has strategic relationships with Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, and SAS. Visit www.platform.com.

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Source: Platform Computing