Inside Asian Gaming

October 2009 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 15 E merging gaming markets in Asia have some potential practical advantages in the drive for shared technical standards, as compared to more mature markets such as the United States and Europe. In Macau, for example, building a new casino on a green field or brown field site allows operators the rare opportunity of designing their information communication systems from scratch. “Normally, in a mature business, up to 80% of any IT manager’s budget—it doesn’t matter what sector you’re working in—is spent on maintaining current infrastructure; maintaining the compatibility (or incompatibility) of various systems,” says Peter DeRaedt of the Gaming Standards Association. “That leaves 20% to invest in new technologies.” Demand change Even in an emerging market such as post-monopoly Macau, however, the casino operators are in the hands of their suppliers when it comes to ensuring systems can communicate with each other. This is especially the case where operators adopt an equipment purchase policy based on ‘best of breed’ criteria, rather than using one supplier. The way to move the debate on is for well-informed operators to lead opinion and markets by asking their suppliers to change. For the foreign-based casino operators working in Macau, however, the desire to transfer older but proven technologies from home markets is often strong. This is essentially a defensive management strategy designed to avoid the perceived risk of expensive down time on the floor while bedding in a brand new system. “In some cases, ancient technologies are being used to build multi-billion dollar businesses. Some of them are essentially from the 1980s,” states Mr DeRaedt. “In a market such as Macau that’s opening new properties, it’s important to understand the benefit of the new technologies and immediately implement them, because it allows you [as an operator] to be more in control; to drive innovation [among the vendors] and ensure you get the products you actually want, versus the products that are being offered to you. There’s a big difference.” In Focus Clean Sheet New casino gaming markets have some inherent advantages when choosing equipment—and some familiar challenges I n order to help implement common standards, the Gaming Standards Association has to convince the industry of their value. That involves educating the existingworkforceandthenextgenerationof decision makers. Operators and equipment suppliers talking to their own staff are already doing some of this educational work in-house. The GSA focuses on industry best practice in technology education in order to help develop an educational programme of its own. “One of my goals in Asia was to establish a relationship with an educational institution that allows us to bring people to Macau and start educating them. We chose Macao Polytechnic Institute two years ago. The relationship enables us to bring people to Macau and have them trained on GSA-industry supported open technology standards,” says Peter DeRaedt. Professional training is now widely accepted across different industries as a rolling, career-long process, reflecting the pace of change in business practise driven by evolving technology. Few sectors can beat gaming when it comes to fast-paced change. The commercial penalties for companies that fail to embrace this rate of change could be very high. If an operator’s technology cannot communicate, it can result in duplication, triplication or even mass-multiplication of effort in running systems and inputting data, suggests the Association. “A customer’s name might be entered in a casino system, say a bonusing system, one particular way, with their given names first. However, if you go to the hotel reservations system you might find that the check-in system enters names differently, i.e., family name first. Why? Why is there a need to enter the same information in different systems and in different formats? It happens if you have one operator or several operators using multiple proprietary communication protocols,” states Mr DeRaedt. Education, Education, Education The case for common standards has to be made clearly to the industry, says the GSA