Applications of Computing in Industry : Lecture

Since inception in the late nineties, online gambling has grown to a multinational business with an annual turnover predicted to exceed USdollars30bn in 2012. Paddy Power is a market leader with turnover of Euro3.8bn in 2010. Of this 68% of turnover and 76% of operating profit was generated by online gaming products presented via a diverse set of channels including web, mobile and phone.

In this presentation we will focus on the challenges that such rapid corporate growth presents to an IT organisation. The impact is felt across all areas including organisational change, evolution of systems architecture and the novel approaches required to model such diverse events as the next team to score the next goal in football, the expected winning distance of a particular greyhound or the likelihood of a particular jockey to fall from his horse in the 3:15 at Newton Abbot.

Simon Moore, Head of Quants R&D, Paddy Power

Graduated 2003 with 1st in Management Science and Information Systems from Trinity College Dublin. The course focused on the theoretical aspects of statistics and mathematics with practical technology and business-skill components with a final year statistics internship with Paddy Power. On graduating worked with Accenture in Dublin and Belfast for 2 years before returning to Paddy Power in 2005 for some real work.

Now Head of Quants R&D (established in 2008). Function handles all trading room modelling and BI requirements and focuses on feeding the trading room with IP-rich solutions central to getting and staying ahead of the competition.

Alan Molloy, Head of Application Development, Paddy Power

Alan heads the application development and maintenance teams at Paddy Power. The teams are tasked with the development and maintenance of a portfolio of software products, primarily used by employees of the company to run its operations. The team is growing rapidly: from 15 last year to 37 today, and an expected 51 by end of year (with 10 in London).

Prior to joining Paddy Power, Alan worked with McKinsey and Company, an international strategy consulting firm. While there, he led a number of engagements, including designing and implementing the Business Intelligence function for a UK healthcare organisation, and identifying GBP1bn savings out of budget of GBP5bn in a public healthcare organisation serving 2.5 million people. Before that, Alan spent 15 years in technology companies in Ireland, the UK and US.

Lewis Foti, Head of London Development, Paddy Power

Joined Paddy Power in 2011 to establish a new, in-house development capability here in London. The initial delivery will be a replacement for the existing Paddy Power financials offering to provide improved capacity and latency. Prior to joining Paddy Power worked as head of high Performance Computing at RBS, leading a team which delivered a shared, cross business line computing service providing in excess of 1m CPU hours/week to support 15 trading and risk management applications.

Prior to working with RBS Lewis has worked in a wide variety of industries including consulting, defence, financial services and new media.

Graduated 1984 with upper second honours in Computer Science from Newcastle University. The course covered a wide spectrum including VLSI design, Operating Systems, language theory and linear modelling.