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The.Gren
Greenbank
A non-insignificant portion of Betfair usage is bookies mitigating their risk. As gbj says, modern bookies are a brokerage/arbitrage business, so if there's one outcome of an event with excessive exposure they'll use (amongst other places) exchanges like Betfair to mitigate that risk.
Old school bookies (and some independent bookies still) used to run on the principle of a long term profit due to the overround, and could often be put in a bad spot by couple of unexpected events in quick succession. Modern bookmakers like to run things in a way to make a guaranteed small profit on each event regardless of the outcome (again, much like Betfair).