From Betting in Kiosks to Successfully Launching Online: Sazka Collaborates with Bluesoft on Developing a Gaming Portal
Sazka is the largest and oldest lottery company in the Czech Republic. Despite its dominant position on the market, it has been rather slow to establish itself in the digital world. The company's goal was to catch up and overtake other players in the online world who realized the potential in this area. Now, it is already one of the strongest players in the field of online entertainment and gaming, thanks to its bet on Kentico's technology solution and its long-term cooperation with the team of Bluesoft from Brno. The latter helped with the deployment of the new web platform and the implementation of the Sazka.cz online gaming portal, including integrations with gaming systems and gaming content providers. Here, he built a customer base that offers new gaming categories and content, including, for example, minute lotteries.
Sazka a.s. is the largest and oldest lottery company in the Czech Republic, providing customers with the widest portfolio of games and everyday entertainment through continuous innovation and responsible management. The most famous game is Sportka, a popular game with a history of over 65 years. Since 2014, the company has been the operator of the Eurojackpot lottery, one of Europe's largest games. The entertainment family also includes scratchcards, sports odds betting and quick-turn games. Sazka provides its products on the online gaming portal www.sazka.cz and through a unique sales network with more than 7,500 points of sale across the Czech Republic.
Strategic transition to online
Sazka is constantly looking for ways to bring more fun to the traditional world of lotteries. This effort is not only about creating new games, but also about innovating their form. Recognising that the company is changing, the emphasis is on maintaining relevance not only for existing customers but also on reaching out to new ones. In 2016, it therefore decided to enter the online gaming world and today offers the widest portfolio of games and entertainment on the Czech market. The company has started to build an in-house digital team and expand its online gaming offering. When selecting a CMS, it considered not only content management options but also marketing requirements, which led to a collaboration with Bluesoft to create a hybrid team responsible for the creation of the web portal and its long-term development.
Sazka chose Kentico as the main platform to implement its digital strategy and at some stage decided to implement it. In 2019, two years after the launch of the gaming product, the company decided to move its online gaming business in a new direction. Instead of outsourcing the front-end, it needed more flexibility and decided to manage the development itself. It approached Bluesoft for direct collaboration, which led to the creation of a team that is partly in-house and partly made up of external experts from Bluesoft. This team, which includes IT business analysts, QA and Bluesoft's complete development department, operates under one process and workflow in Jira.
Extreme demands on user experience
The website itself contains dozens of applications that must be displayed on a single web interface. This puts a strain on the entire development team, as the main requirement of users is fast response and a quality gaming experience. Moreover, the trends in this business are towards interactivity, distinctive graphical elements and animations. In terms of user demands, they are no match for the classic gaming business - just as players want to enjoy CS:GO, for example, they expect a similar experience on the Sazka website. Technically, the so-called minute games are interesting, where elements are shown on the site in real time, working with a countdown to the moment of the draw or with the currently drawn numbers - all this is loaded and displayed from the backend.
"We're bringing a great range of activities for young players. Gradually, we have moved to a larger number of offers and products in the digital solution, which we are also able to present to relevant customer groups in a targeted manner thanks to Kentico technology," says Monika Dubová, manager of front-end development at Sazka.
"Bluesoft is behind the deployment of Kentico and the web interface. The site itself is full of games or applications from partners that needed to be integrated. It is the high number of these that puts a high premium on the speed and stability of the entire solution, which Sazka runs in the Azure cloud. This makes it possible to ensure high availability even if hundreds of thousands of people log in at a time. Our support also plays a crucial role, as we bring flexibility in development and can allocate capacity when needed," adds Jakub Hanák, CTO of Bluesoft, which is part of the BiQ Group technology group.
Technology solutions
- Kentico EMS platform
- Kentico Portal Engine architecture
- HTML5, Sass, Javascript, TypeScript, C#
- Implementation of online lotteries
- Integration of other vendors
- Front-end coding & complete redesign
- Performance refactoring
- Service Level Agreement (SLA) 24/7
- Long-term project development
More about Sazka a.s.
Sazka a.s. is the largest and oldest lottery company in the Czech Republic, providing customers with the widest portfolio of games and everyday entertainment through continuous innovation and responsible management. The most famous game is Sportka, a popular game with a history of over 65 years. Since 2014, the company has been the operator of the Eurojackpot lottery, one of Europe's largest games. The entertainment family also includes scratchcards, sports odds betting and quick-turn games. Sazka provides its products on the online gaming portal www.sazka.cz and through a unique sales network with more than 7,500 points of sale across the Czech Republic. Sazka's terminals can also be used for a number of common transactions, ranging from payment of deposit slips to credit top-ups to parcel collection.
Sazka is a leader in responsible gaming. In addition to the international audited certifications of the European Lotteries and World Lottery Association, it develops its own Play with Reason project and prevention programmes in cooperation with non-profit organisations.
Sazka's parent company is the Allwyn Group, which also operates lotteries in Austria, Greece, Cyprus and Italy, and from February 2024 also became the operator of the UK National Lottery for the next ten years. The Allwyn Group is also active on the American continent. Following the acquisition and rebranding of Camelot Illinois, it operates a lottery in the US state of Illinois under the name Allwyn North America. SAZKA a.s. is a member of the multinational investment group KKCG, operating in 38 countries. For more information, visit www.sazka.cz and www.allwynentertainment.com.
More about BiQ Group
BiQ Group is a technology group built on a proactive and partnership-based approach that enables its experts to guide clients through the challenges of the modern digital world. It consists of five subsidiaries spread across twelve locations in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Thanks to this, it can always be on hand for local champions as well as global players from well-known corporations and promising startups. BiQ Group, which is part of Lukáš Novák's InTeFi group, today consists of more than 460 developers and other specialists with expert know-how in a wide range of technologies. This enables them to deliver a comprehensive service, from tailored development through proven SAP, Atlassian and Kentico Xperience platforms to e-commerce and digital marketing. They deliver projects for T-Mobile, DPD, GTS Alive - ISIC, Škoda, Unipetrol, Allianz pojišt'ovna, Sazka, Tomas Bata University, SZIF, Konica Minolta,Tatra banka and more than a hundred other clients.