Resources

When 888 Holdings, a multinational entertainment company, sought to assure their corporate priorities of security, privacy, and fair play for all of their gaming customers, they chose the Diffusion Intelligent Event Data Platform to guarantee all players of their bingo games on their Dragon fish Bingo platform would receive information concurrently and in real-time.

888 Holdings Limited (888) is one of the world's most popular online gaming entertainment and solutions providers. Under its trusted brands, 888 has been at the forefront of the online gaming industry since its foundation in 1997.

Today, 888’s consumer facing websites offer more than just online gaming. They are entertainment destinations where people can enjoy a truly interactive experience and be part of an online community that shares common interests.

888 offers four core gaming products — 888casino, 888poker, 888sport and 888bingo.

888 began working with Push Technology’s Diffusion in 2014. They were struggling using web sockets and the browser clients for their WinkBingo game were trying to get live games data by polling every few seconds for updates. Bonuses, play vouchers, and players in the Bingo chat rooms were all constantly polling 888’s Bingo platform. This produced an untenable load on the servers. The client applications were never in sync because each player was polling on a different time slot and the clients never knew when there was new data. This process was slow and consumed resources.

eGaming applications must easily scale upon demand and also run optimally over the Internet. However, the Internet is unpredictable – the speed, quality, and load on the networks; variable and often high load on the back-end servers; and time it takes for the data to be sent to the user devices all affect the development of a reliable, resilient, and high performance application.

888 needed to:

• Change their data flow to distribute only changes in the bingo data
• Eliminate the burden of constant and unnecessary server polling
• Assure all players received game updates concurrently and in real-time

Diffusion was the product they chose to address their challenges.

Since 2014, 888 has been successfully using Diffusion to manage and distribute eGaming data to the 100,000 players who play daily on their Dragonfish bingo platform which offers an array of bingo games including WinkBingo.

To scale operations, 888 needed to trigger changes in data, based upon the high-volume real-time game events, without overloading their back-end servers. The 888 development team determined that web sockets and polling could not support the required real-time bingo gameplay.

According to Ronen Tidhar, “Diffusion knows how to manage aggregated data into topics so it is easy to implement the clients.“

The 888 team examined the technology and solution options to meet their event-driven, real-time bingo application requirements; unburden their back-end servers; and reduce network bandwidth usage. In addition, Diffusion’s cache mechanism helped development because prior to using Diffusion, the team had to use different technologies.

They concluded that Diffusion is the right choice.

With Diffusion in place today, the Dragonfish bingo platform's high volume of players cannot overload the 888 back-end servers and all players’ data is always in synch. Gameplay occurs in real-time, assuring that the Dragonfish bingo platform a truly immersive experience.

An important ongoing benefit of Diffusion is that whenever 888 modifies their back-end system, Diffusion minimizes the impact of changes required on the 888 client applications, which can speed support of new functionality and devices.

Diffusion provides 888 with data efficiency and scalability making the Dragonfish bingo games a huge success.