US sportsbooks want to own their own technology. Penn National and Barstool Sportsbook are no different.
The largest operators have all sought to own their tech stack in-house, including:
- Penn National buying theScore with a view to migrating Barstool Sportsbook onto their tech
- DraftKings buying SBTech to move off Kambi
- Caesars buying William Hill to move off OpenBet
- FanDuel bringing more of its tech stack in-house from GAN, IGT and OpenBet
- Bally’s buying Bet.Works
That switch, however, is not an easy one to make.
Headache ahead
It took Caesars Sportsbook 18 months to move onto the William Hill platform. Some states are still not migrated, hinting at the hassle involved.
DraftKings’ move to SBTech took around 15 months and resulted in several hiccups for the consumer.
As DraftKings CEO Jason Robins put it recently:
“That was the largest technology project we’d ever undertaken, migrating to our in-house sports betting tech and product platform. That was a 15-month long project, consuming a very large percentage of our engineering force.”
As recently as June, Robins admitted engineering resources were still focused on the migration and further “cleanup.”
Penn preps for Barstool Sportsbook migration challenge
For DraftKings, the hard part is done and engineering resources can be refocused on product. For Penn National, however, the hard part is still ahead.