Placing its bets on big data, betting and gaming company William Hill PLC is playing for high stakes in the world of artificial intelligence-boosted IT services. Based in the U.K. and expanding in the U.S. since 2012, William Hill has a wealth of gaming data from bets on sporting events, presidential elections and weather patterns to name a few. With this trove of information, William Hill is working to empower its software developer operations teams in customer relations and incident management.

“We provide the opportunities on the website,” said Alan Alderson, director of information technology operations of William Hill. “There is a lot of novelty bets. There used to be [bets on] life being found on Mars, Elvis being found, etc., so there’s a lot. We present about a million opportunities every week for customers to have a bet on.”

Alderson spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco. They discussed how William Hill is implementing IT solutions for the digital transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

PagerDuty helps William Hill with DevOps teamwork

With this kind of business, the amount of data being handled is understandably large — and William Hill is definitely embracing the digital transformation by implementing IT solutions, including PagerDuty, which is a cloud computing company that makes a software as a service incident response platform that integrates machine data and human intelligence to improve event intelligence, analytics and visibility across IT departments.

William Hill introduced PagerDuty to its business in Australia first, but the implementation quickly jumped over to England, according to Alderson. “It was like dropping a pebble into a pool — the ripple effect,” he described. “It’s very quick how the other teams decided to latch onto PagerDuty as well.”

The company across the world has seen an increase in its speed of dealing with issues, according to Alderson. “There’s a lot of manual tasks in there that PagerDuty will come in and automate,” he said. “It will take the pressure off the incident analysts. It’s a lot of pressure on one person to do that, and when there’s pressure mistakes happen.”

As the company’s DevOps team undergoes this transformation, solutions like PagerDuty help things run with the attitude of a team spirit, according to Alderson. “Rather than … delivering something and expecting the ops team to fix it all the time … we are heading towards being a team, where the alerts go to the right people at the right time. And we get issues resolved as soon as possible,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Pager Duty Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for PagerDuty Summit. Neither PagerDuty Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE