Dubai-based SaaS ISV reduces costs 10X and scales to handle millions of gaming odds in real time by migrating to MySQL HeatWave on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Introduction & Background
Plax One DMCC (Plax1) is a Dubai-based SaaS ISV that develops online software and services. It also maintains a supermarket price monitoring product, comparing in real time millions of items across supermarkets and grocery stores in the United Arab Emirates.
For online gaming, the company’s main market, Plax1, leases a platform that powers sports gaming and casino gambling websites run by approved online gaming licensors. Websites operated by brands such as Luckybet.ng in Nigeria and others in Malta, Italy, Spain, Albania and Latin America, rely on Plax1 for offering a seamless experience to its customers.
Business Challenges & Goals
With competitive gaming odds updated every millisecond and thousands of players online simultaneously, Plax1’s challenge is to provide its customer gaming platforms with the highest availability and performance for handling millions of bets throughout the day. It must also provide integrations to customer backend systems, payment gateways and government online gambling regulations.
After 20 years of operating on-premises from a data center, the company’s costly server and networking infrastructure was unable to meet transactional volumes that were skyrocketing in line with the explosion of online gaming worldwide.
To underpin a strategy of expansion in a highly competitive market, in 2023 the company started looking for a way to boost performance and analytical capabilities, whilst eliminating the data center costs. It chose MySQL HeatWave on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Business Results & Metrics
Migrating from $30,000 per month data center servers to the pay-as-you-go pricing scheme of MySQL HeatWave running on OCI resulted in a 10X reduction in infrastructure costs along with a huge boost in performance.
MySQL HeatWave’s massively scalable real-time query accelerator now updates and refreshes millions of gaming odds in milliseconds, resulting in more dynamic gaming sites yielding improved customer experience and higher gross gaming revenue (GGR) for the operators.
Players on Plax1-powered sites are placing bets faster and more frequently. Online gaming sites load 3 times faster and now accommodate 600 queries per second, due to the low latency and high performance of MySQL HeatWave, which increases query processing speed and allocates resources in response to the demands of live gaming traffic.
For operators, the winning horse is MySQL HeatWave’s analytics engine, supplying data analysis in real time without the need for Extract, Load, Transform. Online gaming licensors found enhanced visibility on odds, bets, wins and losses, bet and risk acceptance, generating GGR in real time for understanding how much money they earn or lose.
Plax1 and its customers are no longer limited in resources to handle the ever-growing numbers of online gamers. By using OCI flexible compute shapes, Plax1 at the click of a button optimizes performance to meet surges in online gaming volumes, allowing it to scale dynamically as workloads fluctuate from millions of odds per week to billions of odds per week at peak times.
Reinforcing data management in the face of massive increases in online gaming, Plax1 has harnessed OCI Load Balancer to orchestrate the concurrent gaming of millions of players across Plax1-powered online gaming sites, adjusting seamlessly to weekend and holiday spikes in wagering on sports events or casino games.
Plax1 is using the MySQL HeatWave dashboard for real-time visibility into the performance and availability of its database instances, allowing elastic scaling of resources. “It’s so easy. When I don’t need resources, I turn them off and reduce my bill. When needed, we raise them up and everyone makes more money,” said Fabrizio Farina.
Finally, Plax1 is relieved that Oracle now handles its infrastructure so that it can focus on adding functionality for its customers, in line with a rapidly growing online gaming market where competitors are continuously coming up with novel user experiences.
Why MySQL HeatWave?
Plax1 began using MySQL several years ago and evolved through different versions. When it was time to move to the cloud, it had no hesitation in selecting MySQL HeatWave, for performance, scalability, analytics and pricing.
“The database is the core of any online gaming system; if it gets stuck, people can’t check the odds or bet. MySQL HeatWave is the perfect database for our needs, developed by MySQL and owned by Oracle. If you want to buy a BMW, you buy from BMW Group. For the best database, you go to Oracle,” commented Fabrizio Farina.
Next Steps
Highly satisfied with HeatWave’s analytics engine, Plax1 intends to explore OCI Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning.
It also plans to expand its web applications to sectors such as banks and the public sector using diverse languages such as PHP, Oracle Java and also MySQL HeatWave. It will deploy the new solutions to OCI using the Oracle Application Container Cloud Service. To strengthen its growth strategies, the company will become a member of the Oracle Partner Network (OPN) to achieve expertise and benefits that will contribute to growing the business.
“We are conscious of how much Oracle is helping us and are quite sure that with its technology and as an OPN partner, we will grow more and more,” concluded Fabrizio Farina.