Betfair Wins First Annual Citrix Customer Innovation Award

Published 25th October 2006

Betfair wins first annual Citrix Customer Innovation Award more than 2,000 votes were cast in less than 28 hours via web, phone and text message...

October 25, 2006 — Citrix Systems, the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, has announced that Betfair, the world's leading online betting exchange, has won Citrix’s inaugural Customer Innovation Award - a new annual award programme sponsored by Citrix. The announcement was made at Citrix’s ninth annual business and technology conference, Citrix iForum™ Global 06. The focus of the 2006 customer award is on ‘Innovation in Access,’ and recognises customers who have achieved superior business results by transforming their business using Citrix technology for on-demand access.

The other two finalists for the 2006 award were McAfee, the global leader in intrusion prevention and security risk management, and Ryerson, North America’s leading distributor and processor of metals. Each finalist has demonstrated excellence in transforming their business processes and increasing their competitive advantage using Citrix application delivery infrastructure.

During Citrix president and CEO Mark Templeton’s keynote address, representatives from Betfair, McAfee and Ryerson used videos to showcase how they are using Citrix technology in exciting and innovative ways to grow and differentiate their businesses. iForum attendees were invited to vote for the winner of the award by phone, text message, or online through citrix.com. The customer videos were also made available on http://www.citrix.com/votenow.

After tallying the votes, Betfair’s story of transformative business through application delivery proved to resonate with the iForum attendees this year. The winner was announced at the iForum closing keynote on Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 24, 2006.

Betfair is the world's leading online betting exchange, a concept it has pioneered. Driven by cutting-edge technology, Betfair enables registered users to choose their own odds and bet against each other, even while an event is in progress. Betfair processes five million transactions a day and more than 300 bets a second. As Betfair’s popularity grew, so did the amount of traffic to its website. After piloting solutions from several vendors, the Citrix® NetScaler® application delivery solution came out on top with the best website performance and highest availability capabilities. In fact, other vendors fell short of their promises while NetScaler delivered above what was expected. With Citrix NetScaler, Betfair increases its competitive advantage by increasing customer loyalty through super fast performance and ‘always on’ availability, all while cutting costs from a reduction in network bandwidth and better data centre capacity efficiencies.

“At Betfair we constantly strive to give users the best customer experience. We are therefore proud to receive an award which recognises the service we provide in ensuring that our customers benefit from cutting-edge technology and the most reliable site performance,” said Rorie Devine, chief technology officer, Betfair. “We are also proud to be associated with a company like Citrix. Like us, they are passionate about what they do and deliver real innovation into the marketplace.”