Executives at Bally Technologies Inc.’s latest Asia-Pacific User Conference in Macau have been firmly laying to rest the notion that its systems are the gaming equivalent of a family town car—solid and reliable at the expense of innovation.
The truth is just the opposite, says Tom Doyle, Vice President , Product Management, revealing that Bally has been collaborating with, among others, the mighty Cisco Systems in developing the new generation of high speed networks.
“One of the biggest advantages you’re going to see with Bally is that as a company we went out and acquired a lot of other companies. Along with those companies we acquired a lot of the intellectual resources of developers that had done many different things in many different markets,” explains Mr Doyle.
“Now we’re bringing them all together so that you can buy one system that has more and more features added to it all the time.
“We already have 100,000 games on high speed networks. We’re not getting into the high speed network market. We’ve been in it for a long time. We already know what we can and can’t do with bandwidth for example. Our competitors in many cases don’t have the experience we do. We just went about our business and kept deploying it, but maybe we didn’t get around enough to talking about it,” adds Mr Doyle slightly ruefully.
“Bally for example has completely teamed up with Cisco [Systems]. A whole bunch of us went down there about a month and a half ago. We spent a whole day looking at their coolest and latest and greatest technology that they are deploying out there in all kinds of different industries. We have taken the best networking company in the world and partnered with them.
“We haven’t found ourselves out there bragging about how many slots we have on our line. We have even heard competitors say ‘Bally doesn’t have high-speed networks,’ when in fact we’ve got them all over the place. We have them in some large casinos. We have them in Foxwoods [in Connecticut, USA] for example—in properties with three or four thousand slots. We may not have not been counting our chips so-to-speak by saying ‘Hey we’re the leaders in this environment’.
“We download content all the time to Bally iVIEW over the network. Our game monitoring units are running on high-speed networks. We don’t use Bally Game Net any more over the high speed floors. We go straight into Bally SDS [online slot metering and cashless wagering] over the network.
“We may not have been out there pushing hard enough in saying ‘We’ve been doing this for an awful long time’. It’s really a presentational issue.”
“We work very hard to do what we say we’re going to do,” says Ramesh Srinivasan, Executive Vice President, Systems.
“If you look through the history of gaming in the last three or four years you will see the number of technology promises that some of our competitors have made—how the whole world is going to change around. We have been very careful with our promises, almost to the extent that some people think we are not innovative any more. Our innovation is constrained by reality. If we cannot get something done in the next 12 to 18 months, we are very careful not to promise that we can. Once we give you a promise, we will deliver on that technology. I think in this industry now that is very very important,” states Mr Srinivasan.
So now you know.
