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Here is an excerpt of William Hill IT director Victor Kemeny's interview with Andy McCue, chief reporter at ZDNet.co.uk sister site silicon.com.

FTSE 100 company William Hill is the largest bookmaker in the UK with annual revenues of £8.3bn. But the industry it competes in has been transformed by the internet.

While high street betting shops are still a core part of its business, punters are increasingly moving online, using various interactive digital channels. It's an industry where standing still simply isn’t an option and innovation and speed to market are crucial.

Here is an excerpt of William Hill IT director, Victor Kemeny's interview with silicon.com chief reporter Andy McCue.

Andy McCue: Victor, just how much of an impact has the internet had on William Hill's business?

Victor Kemeny: The internet actually has changed the dynamics of the game. When it came along, there wasn't much belief that people would want to bet on the internet and we thought if we could make £50,000 a year we'd actually have a massive product there. That was in the year 2000. Now we're launching arcade game and that can make potentially between £20,000 and £50,000 a week.

AM: Expanding William Hill's multi-channel betting offerings is key to the company's future growth strategy. Indeed you already have mobile, telephone, digital TV, web. What kind of innovations are you looking at for the future?

VK: It'll be more ball by ball in-running stuff – so, how many minutes before the next goal's going to be scored? How many kicks of the ball before the next throw-in, how many corners in the match, and the ultimate for us is a penalty is given – is it going to be a miss, a save or a goal, yes or no? And for that sort of market you've got 30 seconds to create and take the bets.

AM: As more of your customers interact with you over the internet, that inevitably raises questions over security. Indeed 18 months ago online bookmakers in the UK were targeted by criminal gangs, blackmailing them using denial of service (DoS) attacks. How do you mitigate against that kind of threat?

VK: The way I look at it is, when talking to the police and people like that, they've said we have to be lucky 100 per cent of the time, whereas the bad guys only have only got to be lucky once. We had a DoS attack six or nine months ago and we actually just rode it out. So for over 48 hours, we let the DoS attack run. We were still able to trade business but we were able to mitigate that by some of the activities that we undertook.

AM: You've just embarked on a three year project to replace William Hill's ageing legacy IT, parts of which date back to 1982. Has this old IT hindered William Hill's ability to respond to this fast changing industry and what kinds of new things are you looking to replace it with?

VK: Up until about three or four years ago, it didn’t constrain the business. However, over the last couple of years, it's restricted our ability to respond to market trends. We haven’t been able to get product into market quick enough. What we're intending to do is deliver a more agile platform that will enable us to get to market quicker and actually provide us with a scalability, both horizontally and vertically, that actually means, that as the business grows, depending on what channel it grows in, we can actually scale the infrastructure appropriately.

AM: Because so much of your business is now not only reliant on but driven by technology is there an onus for a lot of the innovation come out of the IT department? How hands-on is the rest of the board and the chief executive with this?

VK: I'm very lucky in that I've got a chief exec that really does understand the technology that we're trying to use and exploit. And one of the challenges over the last couple of years has been to actually help the other members of the board understand what technology can do for our organisation. And we actually have joint teams. We have a joint retail team, we have a joint gaming team, we have a joint remote sportsbook team - and they all work - and it’s a mixture of marketers, technologists, operations people, finance people working in a single team to deliver that technology and that solution.