Inside Asian Gaming

November 2011 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 23 NRT Australia where there are 200,000 slot machines—190,000 of them in pubs and clubs—we didn’t previously have a product set. Today we do. NRT already has a good reputation for supplying quality cash handling technology to the banking and finance sectors. If you’re now going to be price-competitive in the gaming market with people who have been previously offering cheaper products, do you think that will tip things in your favour in terms of building market share in the gaming sector? I think basically there are a number of factors in our favour. One is our reputation and long history of continuing to evolve high-quality products in our markets. Secondly, they’re going to get good value for the dollar; a high return on investment, because we are not compromising the back- office and systemmanagement capability at all. It’s just that it resides in a different place. Obviously the product would have to meet the local jurisdictional guidelines as to what is allowed remotely. However, we feel that in many of the developing countries with evolving casino environments, it’s going to be a very good fit. What’s the time scale in terms of the time to market? The physical hardware part of it is ready today. However, we believe that it’s not going to be introduced to the market until around January. So I see this as being a very active product that we’ll be talking about at ICE in London. We are still developing the software. That’s going tohappen for surebyNovember, but then we also have to get it approved. The key challenge is to have the NRT [back office] infrastructure to support the product. That means more premises, more resources, and more server and database infrastructures. We are working on all of that right now. It takes time. But of course the upside is that our clients for this product are not going to need extra IT people and DBMS specialists to support it. We take up that slack. Taking on that back office function could also help you in your product development because you’re going to have access to the data on usage patterns. We see that as a definite side benefit for us. In essence, we are going to be able to look at statistics which before could only be provided based on the client giving it to you. We believe we should be able to analyse those statistics and be able to tell what should be in the next version. Where are the ‘hot buttons’? Are there any weak points? Those kinds of things. Inner workings—inside the QuickJack 88