A dot com boom of a different sort is under way in the online gaming sector.

This summer has seen the arrival of several new companies on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), as online gaming, and poker in particular, has taken centre stage.

The biggest firm in the market, Partygaming, listed in June with a valuation of £4.6bn – the biggest UK stock market debut in five years. Although its share price has dropped since the initial flotation, the company last month joined the FTSE 100 with a valuation higher than British Airways and Dixons.

The next big listing in the sector came from 888.com, which floated in September with a valuation of £590m.

Most recently OnGame, a Swedish company that operates a range of international online gaming brands, has indicated that it plans to list on the LSE next year.

Its main UK brand, PokerRoom.com, is rated as the world’s third-largest online poker site by PokerPulse, an independent site that tracks the industry’s big operators.

PokerRoom.com comes in below PartyPoker and PokerStars on PokerPulse’s ranking, and is just one spot above 888.com’s Pacific Poker.

The common thread through all these firms is their reliance on IT.

Online betting firm Betfair has already invested £30m in technology to try to ensure its betting platform is the fastest and most resilient in the industry, and is planning a further £20m investment this year (Computing, 21 April).

‘Technology is the basis of Betfair’s success and its application in the betting exchange format has, in a relatively short period of time, revolutionised the way many people bet,’ said Stephen Hill, Betfair’s chief executive.

OnGame is similarly reliant on technology: it employs about 220 staff, of which 160 are developers.

Unlike many others in this market, the company derives its revenues not only from online gaming, but also from selling its technology as a platform for other brands to use.

David Flynn, chief technology officer of OnGame, says his firm provides software to about 15 other companies.

He believes that after the growth the industry has been experiencing, the market will seek to consolidate until just three or four players remain.

This is one of the primary reasons for the recent spate of stock market listings seen this year, says Flynn. ‘We’re looking to list on the LSE next year to raise funds to buy other companies,’ he said.

Flynn says his firm has been outperforming growth in the sector.

‘We’ve been growing at an average of three times the market rate,’ he said. ‘Two years ago we employed 40 people. Today we have 220 and we have adverts out for 45 new positions.’

OnGame’s PokerRoom.com site has more than four million registered users, with between 10,000 and 15,000 new players joining every day. And tremendous scope for growth still remains.

‘Some 80 million people play poker every day in the US alone, but only 15 million of them play online. So we have 65 million people in that market waiting to shift online,’ said Flynn.

Supporting these volumes requires an extremely resilient technology platform: OnGame supports about 20,000 players online simultaneously, who between them play an average of 4.5 million hands of poker worth more than $20m (£11.4m) every day.

‘We have invested a great deal in IT,’ said Flynn. ‘Our platform has to handle about 100 transactions per second.

‘We’re running on 35 servers. Just one year ago we only had 12 servers, so it has tripled in that time.’

Like most of its rivals in the market, OnGame runs a truly international operation: its headquarters are in Stockholm, its primary listing is planned for London, servers are hosted in a native Indian reservation in Canada, and its call centre is outsourced to South Africa.

Flynn’s development team launched the firm’s first mobile gaming application in April and is now working on a range of new products.

He is most excited about a poker application being developed for BlackBerry handheld devices, a move that is sure to boost corporate productivity.

The firm is also developing a full suite of casino games, such as Blackjack, which it plans to announce in the next few weeks.

To keep up with the rapid change in the market, the company has completely changed the way it develops software over the past 12 months.

‘We wanted to move to something very iterative, so we looked into the “lean” programming methodology,’ said Flynn.

‘The result is a significantly faster development cycle, where new components are developed, tested and completed within a month. The change in speed is phenomenal, and it has had a good motivational effect on staff, as they get more deeply involved in the creation of new products.’

How long the growth of the sector will last is anyone’s guess. But for the moment it is as hot as the peak of the dot com boom in 2000.

‘We’re here to stay,’ said Flynn. ‘About three months ago we became number three on the market. Our new goal is to become number one as soon as possible