William Hill triggers UK retail and online gaming content migration
UK bookmaker replaces existing CMS system with Contentstack to ease burden on development team and reduce publishing times
William Hill has agreed a comprehensive content-based technology deal that will see the migration of its entire UK online and retail content system onto the Contentstack platform.
Beginning with Hills’ UK online gaming portfolio, the existing content management systems (CMS) will be moved to the Contentstack platform as part of the wider revamp of the William Hill Vegas brand.
This migration will be followed by Hills’ online sports betting portfolio and finally its UK retail terminals.
This process, which is expected to complete at the end of 2021, aims to offer players a streamlined UX based on a centralised hub of William Hill brands.
EGR understands Hills’ legacy CMS systems were replaced due to a lack of speed when launching new brands and features, as well as a downturn in performance due to increased complexity as innovations were rolled into the CMS system.
Justifying its decision to switch platforms, Hills saluted Contentstack’s headless architecture and rapid deployment ability, as well as the platforms intuitive editor.
“Aside from the cultural fit between Contentstack and William Hill, it was obvious from our early assessment that the Contentstack product speaks for itself,” said William Hill head of engineering in gaming Bartek Gerlich.
“We were particularly impressed by the ability to simplify A/B testing and the speed and ease with which we could spin up new properties and features.
“As a fully cloud-native solution, Contentstack removes a huge amount of the effort our developer team faces and so we are better able to focus on the customer experience.”
Gerlich explained the publishing time of some website features had been reduced from half an hour to just a matter of seconds following the switch.
“That kind of responsiveness is vital in the gaming industry,” he added.
In April, William Hill concluded an 18-month migration of its land-based datacentres onto the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform in partnership with Leeds-based consultancy firm Perform Partners.
The migration cost £4.7m to complete and led to the operator exiting four international datacentres to reduce its datacentre footprint by 70%.
It forms part of the operator’s new ‘cloud-first’ strategy, where organisations move their infrastructure to cloud-based computing systems like AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure.
Instead of relying on physical resources like server clusters, this strategy hosts key resources in the cloud.
The objective of the programme was to reduce operational costs and make Hills more agile from a data intelligence perspective while increasing financial control and visibility.