Wagering Platform

The Typhoon® wagering platform has been built by developers with more than 35 years experience designing wagering systems. It was developed by members of the team that created the world's first sell-pay totalisator and whom introduced the first computer-to-computer cross betting facility. Typhoon® builds on a system architecture that has been field proven in totalisator, lottery and keno deployments throughout the world, but importantly has taken a quantum leap forward in providing for the future needs of wagering operators. It recognises the commercial imperative of immediacy and flexibility in a system in order to continually meet the customer's needs.

Typhoon® offers major new benefits that no other wagering and gaming system can offer. This may seem a considerable claim, however, in order to gain sign-off for Typhoon Pools® to launch, all of the features and the operation of the Typhoon® wagering system noted here were subjected to exhaustive systems validation by BMM Compliance.

BMM Compliance is a global product testing firm that provides testing, assurance, certification and compliance management and advisory services to ensure systems like Typhoon® meet the technical product requirements of regulated gaming markets.

Wagering Platform Features

Unlimited Contestants

Typhoon® has been developed with a key understanding that not just racing but also sports based pools will be highly sought after by consumers. By comparison to horse and dog racing events, competitive sports frequently have large numbers of contestants.

Understanding this the developers of Typhoon® have ensured that the Typhoon® wagering platform can have an unlimited number of contestants, which is not the case with the current wagering systems. Current systems were in the main specifically built to accommodate the needs of the race wagering operator and did not foresee a need for unlimited contestants, with most systems being limited to 24 entrants/runners.

With its unlimited contestant capability Typhoon® now enables pari-mutuel wagering operators the opportunity to extend their offer to include pools on sporting events previously only available through fixed odds operators - sporting events like Tour de France or the US Open Golf and NASCAR.

Typhoon® also allows an operator to add and remove contestants at any stage in real-time.

No need for sequential contestant numbering

Another key attribute incorporated into the development of Typhoon® is the implicit understanding that having to use sequential numbering of contestants can be limiting and harder to manage in large contestant fields. Rather than forcing each contestant in an event to have an arbitrary system propagated number, Typhoon® enables the operator to conduct a pool and accept wagers based on the contestant's shirt number, car number or simply their name.

Multiple Pools

Many of the current systems in use are limited by the number of concurrent events and pools they can offer and are only able to offer one bet type pool (i.e. trifecta) per event. This is not the case with Typhoon®. Typhoon® can run multiple bet type pools on a single event.

Typhoon® accommodates what happens in the real world; it lets the operator open and close pools on-the-fly as an event unfolds in real-time. For example, before and after each round in a golf tournament, before and after qualifying in Formula 1, at various stages of the Tour de France, etc.

Widest range of pari-mutuel bet types

Typhoon® offers the widest range of pari-mutuel bet types currently available and as a system is limited only by the operator's imagination. The modular design of the software enables new bet types to be easily created and added. The current suite of bets types (all currently used by Typhoon Pools®) have been carefully designed around considered combination and permutation outcomes and include Typhoon Pools® marquee bets the Force 4™, Force 6™, Force 8™ and Force 10™.

Setting Commission

Typhoon® allows operators to vary the way commissions are calculated and accounted for on the various bet types. Most alternative systems require major re-writes and considerable testing to add new betting products.

Betting Trends

Typhoon® provides the widest range of betting trend displays, which are accessible via conventional point of sale displays, the internet and cellular mobile devices.

Punter betting information

Typhoon® lets customers see betting information that has never been available before. While betting is taking place, punters can see progressive dividends for any bet type including all exotic multi-dimensional pools. For exotics and lottery-style pools, should the operator choose to allow it, customers can see exactly what the dividend or first division prize will be if their wager is successful.

Multi-currency

Typhoon® can store any number of different currencies in a single player account. Typhoon® can also collate wagers in different currencies on the same pool and automatically normalise them to produce a unified pool using a nominated base currency. Cross betting and commingling use the same mechanism.

Multi-lingual

Typhoon® handles, via Unicode, all Western European and all Asian languages including those that require complex characters such as Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Multi-channel

The modular architecture of Typhoon® allows for seamless integration of additional channels for both cash and account-based wagering such as traditional terminal networks, self-serve terminals, call centres, interactive voice response, the internet, mobile internet and SMS.

Most alternative systems require major changes to their host or core software to incorporate additional channels.

Unlimited Transaction History

Typhoon® keeps transactions forever, which allows an operator to query how many times a player has participated in each and every pool, enabling operators to observe and analyse player behaviour and thereby reward accordingly.

This same functionality also underpins the built-in facilities for player discipline and protection safe-guards that are designed to identify and manage problem gambler behaviours.

Technical Specifications

Operating Software

Typhoon® runs on the open source Linux operating system and is written entirely in Java giving it all of the benefits of state-of-the-art 21st century software engineering and makes Typhoon® highly robust and extremely reliable.

By using Java as the core programming language, Typhoon® is able to deliver a sophisticated graphical user interface for monitoring and controlling all aspects of its operation, and also ensures that Typhoon is portable across new generations of server platforms as they are developed.

Hardware

Typhoon® runs on cost efficient, commercial off-the-shelf servers and storage hardware, which ensures the operators can acquire Typhoon® at a substantially lower cost of ownership and maintenance.

Technical Architecture

Typhoon® uses a system architecture that:

  • Encrypts all communications traffic sent externally using industry standard, strong cryptographic ciphers.
  • Employs a no-single-point-of-failure system architecture.
  • Relies on a proven active-plus-spare design in which the wagering server has a warm backup that is automatically brought into service in the event of failure.
  • Completely automates fault detection and fail-over without the need for operator intervention.
  • Never sends a response or updates its persistent data store until a transaction has been safe-stored to two separate disks.

No Downtime Requirement

The Typhoon® wagering platform requires no downtime.

Typhoon® is designed to operate 24 hours a day, 7days a week, day-in and day-out and never needs to shutdown for system housekeeping.

The Typhoon® technology is designed for contemporary business situations and has overcome the significant hindrance to daily operations experienced by wagering operators with existing legacy systems that require a daily start-stop operational cycle.

By designing the system to be 24/7 compliant, operators are able to access betting product from around the world with no limitations on overlapping event times, rolling over of account information, unclaimed winnings and open pool data that would otherwise need to be downloaded and then uploaded to the system on a daily basis.

Transaction Processing Engine - Javelin

At the core of Typhoon® is Javelin, an extremely secure transaction processing engine.

Wagering and gaming systems are by necessity high performance transaction processing engines. Each transaction starts with a bet being placed at a wagering terminal - the terminal may be a conventional point-of-sale device, a web browser or a cellular mobile device. Performance is measured by throughput - the number of transactions processed each second, and response time - the round-trip time for each request/response pair.

Wagering and gaming systems also have very stringent requirements for data integrity and recoverability. If any single system component should fail for any reason then it is a requirement that all bets which have been accepted by the system up to that point must be quickly recoverable; that is, the system must be capable of being restarted promptly, and with no loss of data. These requirements profoundly affect the design of wagering systems - at both the hardware and software levels.

Typhoon® satisfies these demanding requirements through the use of Javelin, an extremely secure, ultra high performance transaction processing engine designed specifically for betting applications.

Achieving high speed, while at the same time maintaining very short turnaround times, is a considerable technical challenge. Javelin combines extreme speed – thousands of transactions per seconds – with very low latency responses – sub-100 millisecond turnaround times.

The antecedents of Javelin have been used in a large number of totalisator systems in Australia and abroad, including one of the world's largest on and off-track totalisator systems at the Korea Racing Association, a 5,000 terminal lottery system developed for Tattersalls, and numerous wide area keno systems.

The key features of Javelin are:

  • Javelin is not a relational database – databases are too slow for demanding betting applications, and are relatively easy to falsify data by retrieving, modifying and re-writing an existing record. It is extremely difficult to modify an existing transaction in Javelin without permanently disrupting the surrounding transactions. Javelin does not have "rewrite in-place" capability to ensure the highest level of betting system security – the Breeders Cup Pick Six fraud could not have happened with Javelin.
  • Javelin safe-stores the details for every transaction to duplicated storage arrays. This provides a persistent data store which enables transactions to be retrieved at a later stage (e.g. payout).
  • Javelin provides a journaling facility which allows the full context of a transaction to be restored after a failure - that is, recovery of all data is guaranteed.

Typhoon® exploits a reliable transaction processing engine, a proven system architecture, and 21st Century software engineering techniques to provide a platform for the deployment of a diverse range of wagering and gaming systems. This unique combination results in what we believe to be the premier betting platform available today. For more information please email us.