Inside Asian Gaming

September 2011 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 69 L axino Technology Ltd was born of a desire to create opportunities for aspiring Information Technology professionals in Macau. According to Laxino’s Vice President of IT ProfessionalServicesDouglasHo,“previously, IT professionals in Macau generally had to take on support-type jobs—work that is considered kind of low-end in the IT field. That’s why I wanted to be part of an effort to create a company that offers higher-end kind of IT jobs, such as architectural design, rather than just support.” Laxino was established in June 2008 by Lam Iao, featured on this year’s Asian Gaming 50 list. Mr Ho was among the founding team members. Laxino’s IT Professional Services unit, headed by Mr Ho, serves a variety of functions, including helping to deploy the games and software from the company’s development teams, and providing end-to- end IT services to land-based casinos and non-gaming enterprises. Inside Asian Gaming spoke to Mr Ho to learn more about his unit’s various functions. IAG : Please describe the service you provide your clients. Douglas Ho : We provide end-to-end service. We work with the customer to identify their needs from their business perspective, and then translate that into IT needs, and from there, we help them select appropriate technology as well as so-called technological products. We look at IT professional service as not just PC support, but rather, as an end-to-end solution from the business perspective. We look at the business value that we can create or the business benefit that technology can create, and from there, we will identify the appropriate technology product or technical solution. Then, we deploy that solution to help the customer optimize their business performance. We evaluate the solution according to its strategic value, rather than just from a technical standpoint and its ability to improve productivity and efficiency. We seek to use IT as a strategic weapon to improve a company’s competitive advantage—that’s when IT creates a really big value. How does your unit work with the software development teams within your company? After the software developed by those teams is ready, we need to deploy it— basically, put it up and running in a data centre, and then release it for the end user. Here [at the IT Professional Services unit] we take care of the more backend deployment kind of activity. We set up the data centre, establish a network infrastructure, put in all the servers, put in all the networking equipment, and then install the software, install the application, and then keep the operation healthy and running. Is it hard to get qualified IT staff in Macau? Yes, it is. Experienced talent is not only in high demand in Macau, but also in short supply. Basically, there is not enough manpower. Does that mean it’s more attractive for companies to outsource to someone like you, rather than maintaining their own in-house IT departments? IT projects require ramp up and higher costs than if you utilise a specialist company such as Laxino. When casinos undertake IT projects, either they need to bring in IT staff from overseas, or they can engage us. Because we have a local presence, our cost is not as high as flying people in. We have a 24-hour helpdesk for our clients. And if we need to actually send in technical staff to remedy a client’s problem, we can do that. How do you retain your staff? This is a tough thing to do. I think we are doing a pretty good job with that. One of the key things we do to retain our staff is we provide them an environment they enjoy working in. It’s an environment that basically brings about a high level of trust among management and staff, and also one of our core values is we try to ingrain mutual respect among members of the company, regardless of their rank. If you don’t do this, if your staff receives higher paying job offers elsewhere, they would just go where the money is. But if you have this kind of work environment and team spirit, then people will hesitate to leave, because even though over there they may get more money, they may not have such a happy life. That is one of our main means to keep our people. Douglas Ho Steady Support Macau IT heavyweight Laxino Technology Ltd transforms IT demands into sustainable business solutions for businesses of all sizes Laxino Technology