Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | January 2010 30 “We have it in our South Africa office, in our Europe office, and we have it in Las Vegas. We have more than 500 employees worldwide now that can handle this in our 13 offices. That gives us a large competitive advantage.” This remote testing and remote database interrogation may seem somewhat at odds with the idea of a gaming laboratory as a place where technicians in white coats rummage inside the belly of a slot machine. Ian Hughes points out that remote testing is complementary to, rather than a substitute for, tests on the physical machine itself. “The point is that when a submission takes place, the machine itself is always physically in our custody somewhere at one of our 13 facilities around the world,” he states. “So if some issue arises during interoperability testingor diagnostic analysis via GLI Link, we, as a laboratory, still have the ability physically to examine the machine.” “We’re very transparent in our approach,” adds Ms Eickelman. “Whatever GLI office a supplier visits, they will see the same processes and approach. We don’t just open offices, we open labs. We become fully committed to the region that we’re working in. It’s really easy for a compliance testing company to say, ‘Oh we have an office in such-and-such a place’ when it could just be an executive suite with one person working part time and the mail goes there. The question then is, ‘Where’s the testing done?’” ‘GLI-Pod’ When GLI physically receives a machine in Las Vegas, it goes into one of the site’s engineering ‘pods’. These are booths to one side of the main lab floor where teams of engineers can go through a list of checks. “Worldwide, we have more than 500 employees, just over 70 of whom are here in Las Vegas,” explains Ian Hughes. “We keep our teams in small groups to ensure they are well managed and that nothing gets lost in the flow. We have a technical manager that oversees about 20 engineers. And then within that group, there are another two senior engineers, and ten engineers under each senior engineer— good small team groups. “We would love to have one of these systems in every one of our labs around the world, but it’s just too costly. So we have designed an internal solution to that, and that’s GLI Link. “Thanks to advances in technology by the system manufacturer, we’re now able to convert what is normally a local area network environment into a wide area network environment. We do this via our proprietary setup, GLI Link. Routing “Basically, we’re routing in each of these systems into a panel here. Then we’re making it available via other panels. There’s one in every one of our offices. It’s in our Nevada office, and its’ the same set up in New Jersey, Macau, Colorado, Netherlands and in Australia, etc. “During your visit today, we have machines that are all connected to our system based in Golden, Colorado. “It’s just a normal PC—no server, no application, nothing running. It’s hooked into GLI Link, as too are these machines. Now because it’s G2S, there’s no interface card. There’s a card reader, but there is no slot machine interface board. The Ethernet comes directly into the machine, and the machine itself is the interface. “The server’s in Colorado, so an engineer in Las Vegas has a view of the terminal in Colorado. If we open the door of a slot machine in Las Vegas hooked up to the system, that event is sent down GLI Link to Colorado and our engineer can see it in real time. “The engineer can also take game content from the server in Colorado, push it onto a cabinet in Las Vegas, and it can be up and running. So it’s basically wide area network gaming via GLI. Event log “If we did an event [such as opening a cabinet] and it didn’t come through on the system, how would we know the problem is with the game rather than with GLI Link? We need to know it’s not our problem before we start going off to the manufacturer and saying, ‘Hey, that event didn’t come through’. So there are a lot of diagnostics that our IT dept have brought into GLI Link to do message tracing and all those sorts of things, so that we can go back to the manufacturer and say: ‘We’re absolutely sure that the problem lies with such and such’.” Despite the logistical benefits of testing via GLI Link, there are some jurisdictions that require testing to be conducted in a specified locationoftheregulator’schoosing—namely GLI GLI’s global headquarters in New Jersey