SoftwareOne enables Playzido to build their platform on AWS

The Challenge

Playzido is a new B2B games platform which supplies a remote gaming server to real money and social gaming operators. The open platform utilises a bespoke version of Black Cow Technology’s cutting-edge OGA software and works closely with key development partner Ingenuity Gaming on game development. Playzido features a selection of premium games from their flagship game provider, Endemol Shine Gaming, in addition to content from cherry-picked suppliers. It also delivers a selection of innovative marketing features, empowering operators to market to their customers in new and exciting ways.

Playzido is a start-up formed as part of a joint venture and which meant that developing the platform and launching quickly was significant in terms of bringing new games to market and new operators onto the Playzido platform. Playzido earns revenues through the operator’s customers playing the games that are offered. Playzido’s business challenge was that the AWS partner they initially selected to design and operate the infrastructure said they could design and deliver the solution within 20 days and it took them far longer. This had a major impact on when Playzido could integrate and launch games as well as comply with the SLA’s they had agreed with the operators. It also then became apparent to Playzido that the selected partner did not have the expertise to deliver the AWS solution nor manage it thereafter. The delivery eventually took 6 months contributing towards significant revenue challenges and reputational damage. Aftermarket research on their options Playzido decided to migrate the infrastructure design and operational services to SoftwareOne to bring back stability to the business and improve investor confidence.

The Solution

Playzido had 3 key selection reasons for choosing AWS on which to build their platform.

• As a start-up venture, they needed to ensure costs were as low as they could be and strategically, they need to leverage managed services as their in-house team is small.
• They really need their internal team to focus on value-creating work such as integrating their platform into operators and building additional games onto their platform.
• Management and maintenance of services and systems whilst vital to the business were to be out-sourced due to the other demands on the team and therefore using AWS managed products and AWS Managed service provider, SoftwareOne, was bought in to deliver the reliability, performance and security SLA’s that Playzido’s operators and customers expect. Playzido chose AWS because the cost for their solution proved to be more cost-efficient than Google Cloud, secondly, they don’t have an inhouse DBA and AWS offered fully managed database service in Aurora.

Once it was evident the incumbent partner could no longer fulfil the requirements Playzido acted quickly and engaged a number of other partners. SoftwareOne were selected for 2 key reasons:

• As Playzido is part of the Gambling industry they’re regulated to comply with standards set by the Gambling Commission. One of the requirements is to ISO27001. SoftwareOne was one of the few partners who are certified.
• SoftwareOne has over 200+ AWS certifications in their Professional and Managed services teams and had a clear process and approach to how they would take control of managing the AWS infrastructure and how they would be able to produce a backlog of activities to improve the stability and efficiency of the architecture. Pedro Furtado, Playzido CTO said “SoftwareOne very quickly gave us the confidence that they could deliver against our needs and requirements within the urgent timeframe we needed them to.” As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner SoftwareOne has many AWS partner competencies including the DevSecOps, Migration and Well Architected.

By using the AWS Well-Architected Framework and SoftwareOne’s deeper level architecture review and audit process SoftwareOne and Playzido were able to have clear visibility of the current state of Playzido infrastructure mapped against AWS best practice. SoftwareOne produced a backlog of activity that needed to be addressed by SoftwareOne and Playzido in order to get the service in line with AWS best practice. To fully optimise their benefits Playzido chose to use many of SoftwareOne managed service modules including infrastructure management, CI/CD management, security and compliance management, service availability management and cost optimisation.

SoftwareOne has been diligently working through and re-factoring a lot of the infrastructure and re-organising Playzido’s terraform repository. Pedro Furtado says: “SoftwareOne actively take control of fixing issues by pre-organising the fixes in advance, submitting change requests to us to approve and helping us move through the backlog quickly means a lot to us. SoftwareOne spent 6 months re-organising the code base and by actively fixing code means that it’s far easier to manage and we spend less time troubleshooting problems and more time focussed on value creation work like integrating operators and games onto the platform which actually generate the revenues for Playzido.”