“Camelot has invested £60 million in new media to introduce innovative methods of playing National Lottery games as part of our commitment to extending the reach of the National Lottery. Customers can purchase weekly draw tickets on the Internet, via mobile phones and through Sky TV’s interactive service. Managing multiple sales channels creates a demanding operating environment but using solutions from Mercury has enabled us to build and operate robust, scalable systems that deliver exceptional levels of reliability. Its solutions also delivered a measurable return on investment by reducing the manual effort involved in testing and enabling comprehensive systems monitoring.
"National Lottery ticket sales via interactive channels are a great success, showing sustained growth since launch, helping us to maximise returns to the Good Causes in a socially responsible way. Today, Camelot operates the most successful interactive lottery in the world.”
- Eric Brown, Head of Interactive Technology, Camelot Group plc.
Camelot Group plc is the operator of The National Lottery® and is committed to raising money for the Good Causes designated by Parliament. Camelot is not responsible for distributing or awarding these funds.
To date, over £17 billion has been raised for Good Causes by The National Lottery, benefiting more than 200,000 individual projects across the UK in the biggest programme of civic and social regeneration since the 19th century. The National Lottery has given away £24.7 billion in prizes and created more than 1,700 millionaires or multi-millionaires since launch in 1994.
Camelot runs one of the most cost-efficient lotteries in the world, with around 5 per cent of total revenue taken in operating costs. At 40 per cent of total sales (28 per cent to Good Causes and 12 per cent in lottery duty to the Government) Camelot returns a higher proportion of lottery revenue back to society than any other lottery operator in the world. National Lottery retailers receive 5 per cent of total revenue in commission, and 50 per cent of sales is paid out to players in prizes.
Players of all National Lottery games must be aged 16 or over.
The Value of Testing
Eric Brown, Head of Interactive Technology at Camelot says: “Although we manage a high number of often relatively low value transactions, each ticket has the potential of extremely high value winnings. In our game environment there is no margin for error. Therefore, testing is extremely important to our business and the investment we have made in automating the testing process means that the test team can spend their time testing new functionality rather than regression testing existing functionality.”
Mercury delivers speedy results
Camelot has been using Mercury’s application delivery and application management solutions since the company's launch, as Brown comments: "Mercury is clearly the market leader, and we already had the skills in-house to use the products from its Performance and Quality Centers. As the business expands and we appoint new automation and performance testers, Mercury’s prominence ensures that people will already have the skills and training required to use the solutions.”
Game simulation
When products are being designed, Mercury LoadRunner is used to emulate the conditions under which the game will be run and simulates tens of thousands of users to check that it is robust enough to launch. Observes Brown: “We also apply LoadRunner to investigate site performance. Response time is critical to a great customer experience when playing on-line games and LoadRunner helps us achieve a high level of performance.”
Mercury WinRunner runs alongside LoadRunner to automatically test the systems that the games run on. Engineers can use WinRunner to perform regression tests to ensure that new games don’t damage the platform or games that are already live. The importance of testing is underlined by the fact that new games products are tested many hundreds of times, by up to 30 different team members. The test environment generates large volumes of information and Mercury TestDirector is used to direct and store tests.
To analyse the performance of the Live Systems, Mercury SiteScope, a component of Mercury’s Business Availability Center, is applied to monitor performance including variables like the speed at which home pages load or how screens respond to user interaction. Any issues are automatically flagged to Camelot’s Operations Team via the user interface.
Flexible Partnership
“We have a strong partnership with Mercury and the company has tailored its offerings to our tough operating demands. Our business truly operates in a zero tolerance environment where game players must have total confidence in the experience. Mercury software has helped us develop this trust and the strong sales of tickets via interactive channels verifies the growing strength of our new game brands.”
