A Grand gesture: How Grand Parade has influenced William Hill

In 2016 William Hill acquired technology specialist and independent operator Grand Parade to improve its front-end capabilities and overall tech and development operations. At the time, the operator realised it had to look externally for a refreshed approach to its product and platform and Grand Parade provided exactly that. It is common for large, legacy tech firms to stumble in its endeavour to remain relevant and face the possibility of slipping behind newer and more agile firms.

But Hills nipped this fear in the bud by snapping up Grand Parade when it did. Almost three years on from the purchase and while the two platforms are not yet fully integrated, the Grand Parade team in Krakow is now responsible for the majority of front-end developments across the William Hill brand catalogue.

Head of architecture at the Krakow office Ciprian Negrila says the merging of the two technologies was approached analytically and out of the process has arisen a stronger and more reliable system and much more well-informed tech teams.

“We leveraged the knowledge and systems of both sides to make the best of both technologies. The results are that we now have a very stable platform for our customers while achieving radical improvements in the way we do everything,” Negrila explains.

In the fight to remain current and relevant in today’s fast-paced era for software development, the Hills offshoot is prolific in its involvement in wider technology events. In its Krakow home, innovation is rife among major industry players, including the likes of Cisco, IBM, Uber and Revolut, all of which have tech hubs in the Polish city.

In being so heavily involved and vocal in the local tech community, Grand Parade has forged valuable partnerships with Google Developers Group, an initiative with the backing of Google Developers. In discussion with EGR Technology, Negrila elaborates further.

Ciprian Negrila is William Hill’s architecture lead

EGR Technology: Which internal and external tech events is Grand Parade a part of and why?

Ciprian Negrila (CN): We’re involved in anything and everything that is interesting to our teams and supports personal development and our culture of continuous improvement – or as we call it – to go one better.

We’re strongly supporting local IT communities – we have hosted events with Google Developers Group (Android Tech Talks, Let’s talk about UX), Product Tank, Cocoaheads (iOS meetups), Women in Agile (Introduction to Agile Management) and Liberating Structures. We’ve supported in the past many other conferences – from dev.js meetups, through Student Academic Festival to Devoxx, Geecon, Mobiconf, Front-Trends, Krakow.js and much more.

We’re also willing to share through Quality Questions events – a series of meetups and workshops where we share our knowledge and expertise from the quality assurance field. Each meetup brings more than 100 participants to the Grand Parade office.

We’ve plenty of internal initiatives as well – starting from hackathons, agile toolbox and leadership academy that’s driven by our community of practice, agile open spaces to sports initiatives like Cheltenham Tipster Competition that is driven regularly.

We’re also engaged in the Women in Tech initiative. In the past we have supported the Women in Tech Summit and hosted Introduction to Agile Management for non-IT managers but we also have our internal Women of William Hill (WoW) initiative.

To create a great place to work and sense of belonging, diversity is celebrated and encouraged. In order to build next generation technology, you need to have progressive thinking. It’s a multi-national and multi-cultural team working across several offices so it’s really important to be able to tackle all of these separate points and have this common denominator that is the culture at William Hill.

EGR Technology: What’s the history of Grand Parade and what sort of tech roles do your teams carry out?

CN: Grand Parade was a software house working for clients mostly from betting, gaming and media industries. In 2016 the company was acquired by William Hill. The office here is a development centre and tech hub for William Hill and we have all tech roles covering developers, product, UX and UI designers, operations, security, architecture, data, delivery and our teams support the digital, retail and corporate services within the business.

EGR Technology: What is the team working on right now?

CN: We’re covering all the sites including sportsbook and gaming. And we’re talking about a new concept we’re trying to build which is having the sites customisable to include personalisation for the customers but also the ability to dynamically control the content over different jurisdictions and geographical areas. We’re building a customisable implementation of the website where in one country you would see one version of the site and in another you’d see a different version. Although it will be based on geographical location, it will also of course be based on the user.

We’re working towards achieving that because we believe it’s really important to align with our business strategy. We want to become the leading mobile provider for sportsbook. So, we need a more flexible product that is better aligned and better streamlined with the expectations of the customers to help them achieve what they want to achieve on the website. All the mobile developing happens in the Krakow office for the entire William Hill group.

EGR Technology: In recent months operators have faced issues with Apple’s strict guidelines for featuring on the App Store. Have you faced any challenges there?

CN: We know most of our competition faced challenging issues in that area. We followed the rules as they were written which means our applications contain enough native functionality to not be considered web-based applications. Like others in the industry however; we’re facing some headwinds and we’re working through to get some clarity from Apple.

EGR Technology: What other areas are you looking at in terms of general and wider technology movements? What are the latest innovations of interest?

CN: We already have around 80% of our platform on microservices and the next thing we’re looking at is going 100%. On top of that we want to migrate onto the cloud. So right now, we’re trying to figure out the best ways architecturally to implement this orchestration. With this sort of approach, you can get tens of thousands of microservices and they can be duplicated or have duplicated functionality. The management and orchestration is really hard to do but really critical. The impact can be quite big in terms of reliability and uptime. This is really on our minds right now in terms of trying to figure out the best way forward without breaking the existing system.

We’re trying to become more flexible and agile but, in the meantime, we want to be conservative and observe the progress and impact of the changes we’re making and not be too aggressive with these. We are trying to keep things familiar but also progressive.

EGR Technology: When Grand Parade was acquired by William Hill, how were the technology and operations integrated? How do processes differ now from before the purchase?

CN: After the acquisition most of the team stayed to be a part of William Hill’s powerful brand and in the immediate period after the purchase nothing was changed but the focus started to shift onto the development of the already existing technology and integration of the two technology stacks. We were able to leverage the know-how of the guys that built Grand Parade’s stack to integrate the systems with William Hill’s. It was mostly an exchange of knowledge between the two teams. It’s been two and a half years already and in this time people were always comfortable with everything going on. We leveraged the knowledge and systems of both sides to make the best of both technologies. The results are, we now have a very stable platform for our customers while achieving radical improvements in the way we do everything.

EGR Technology: In that context, what do you predict the Mr Green integration will look like?

CN: We’re being careful about the integration and are working closely with both teams to integrate as best as we can, doing the right thing for our customers, people and business.