Bally: The Next Generation
Bally Technologies’ Slot Data System 11 is one of the company’s many products helping to drive the Asian slot revolution
Tom Doyle, Vice President Product Management for Bally Technologies Inc., was in Macau recently with a team of colleagues to explain the work the company is doing in systems development to support Asia’s growing slot market. He outlined some of the enhanced functionality of Bally Slot Data System (SDS) in its latest format (known as version 11) when he spoke at the latest Bally Asia-Pacific User Conference at The Venetian Macao.
“Bally SDS as a platform has been around as a long time, and has deep functionality, but we’re committed to constantly modernising and upgrading it,” says Mr Doyle.
“We have taken it into a world where it now operates as a Windows-based solution, with click, drag and drop, drop-down screens, and functionality in the reports that make it easier to use and make it exceptionally user-friendly.
“Bally SDS is a product with a lot of history and a lot of in-built redundancy in the system, so in the unlikely event that the system does go down, it’s going to be for a very short time. We’ve created an updated product that not only operates in that environment, but in high-speed networks and in both Windows and Unix platforms. It’s one of the first systems that we’ve taken into a multi-platform environment in casinos,” he explains.
“What we have at Bally’s product development centre in India are 500-600 programmers, along with another 100-plus people that run the administration side of our business. It means we have been able to take things to a whole new level—way beyond where we could have imagined if we tried to do it with more limited resources. We are very excited about Bally SDS today, and we’re very excited about where Bally SDS is going.”
“As well as Bally SDS’s flexibility when it comes to working alongside a casino’s existing technology, Bally SDS 11 has a significantly enhanced level of functionality compared to the previous generations of the system”, says Mr Doyle.
“Some of the features of Bally SDS 11 really help cater not only to the regular customer but to the higher level customer. We have done things for example with consolidated reporting and higher limit pay outs,” he explains.
“Also if people want to go into a casino and they want to reserve a [slot] game for a while, we’ve added a game reserving feature in our level 11 products. It’s very very popular for example in casinos where there’s been an imposition of a smoking ban. Somebody can go out and take a smoking break and keep his or her machine so somebody else doesn’t play it,” he explains.
Although smoking is allowed in Macau casinos, the Bally SDS 11 game reserving feature gives players in any jurisdiction the comfort and convenience of refreshment breaks away from their favourite game and favourite machine, without the worry that someone else will step in, play the machine and benefit from a big payout.
Bally SDS 11 also has important benefits for operators, including a range of new features to enhance the fraud protection capability of the Bally SDS series.
“On jackpot hits we’ve added in a credit ‘key off’ for fraud protection,” says Mr Doyle.
“Once the jackpot is hit, instead of paying them [the player] out in cash, the slot attendant comes and keys over the machine. We use SAS [Slot Accounting Standard] commands to key off the game. Monies in the jackpot go straight onto a credit meter. Often a high level customer will just continue to play. They don’t have to have their play interrupted. The fraud protection is that when that key off occurs, a message is sent to the system to cancel the ability to print out a jackpot slip. The fraud protection that’s built in is two-way communication to make sure that nobody [no employee] can ‘double dip’. And just to be safe, we even have special reports. If someone miraculously did everything at the same time, or unplugged the GMU [game monitoring unit] in the middle of a transaction, we would have reports that would point out ‘Hey look, this person did this’, and we would catch the thief just like that,” states Mr Doyle.
Offline ticketing is also built in to Bally SDS 11. In the unlikely event that the system goes down, the product provides operators with the ability to print out up to 35 offline tickets per gaming device—enough ticket printing capacity to last most casinos a couple of days.
“If a system was down for a couple of days it would be pretty scary. The reason we did it that way though is because we deal with so many different regulatory jurisdictions we had to make the number of offline tickets configurable,” explains Mr Doyle.
“By making the offline printing function completely configurable in SDS, if the regulator says ‘We only want three tickets printed offline if the system goes down’, we can configure it [Bally SDS] appropriately. It will tell the GMU, ‘Print three offline tickets’. After that everything goes into ‘hand pay’.
Bally SDS 11 also pays close attention to the needs of the cage and the back office of a casino’s operation.
“In the cashiering module [of Bally SDS] we also allow you to redeem offline tickets. What we do is we have certain mathematical hatching algorithms to re-calculate a ticket. So with this offline module the cashier can actually enter in (even if they’ve lost communication back at the client end) information from the ticket, and it will say whether or not that 18-digit number is a valid number for the dollar value of the ticket, and can validate the other information on the ticket. By doing that we have a reasonable assurance that it’s a legitimate ticket,” says Mr Doyle.
In developing Bally SDS 11 the company has been listening closely to the needs of operators on a range of issues including restricted credits. This is where credits are downloaded to a particular slot machine on behalf of a player, but the player then decides he would like to try his luck on a completely different machine.
“As we’ve started to roll out in the field our promotional credit features so that operators can award free play credits to customers, we’ve found some casinos were very concerned that players would go onto a machine, they [the casino] would download them a hundred dollars in credit and the customer would play a little while, but then they’d think ‘I don’t really like this machine. I don’t want to stay here and finish playing’.
“But those are restricted credits, so while we could print out restricted tickets [another feature we have] a lot of people don’t want to do that. So what we have done is we actually generate a feature—and it’s configurable, you can turn it on and off—whereby the customer, if he or she decides they’re going to leave, can pull their card out and the credits go back up into the system and basically repopulate the customer’s account. That customer can then go to another machine and they can start playing that other machine and download the credits again. This way they don’t lose credits they have not yet played,” explains Mr Doyle.
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“It’s a pretty cool feature that is very advantageous [to operators and players]. We have had a number of [operator] customers turn that feature on and use it, and they’re very excited about it. They really feel it’s giving customers the ability to move from machine to machine even though at one machine they may have downloaded at one particular machine more credits than they are likely to use.”
Mr Doyle adds that Bally SDS is focused on maintaining an open system architecture so that Bally SDS can work with equipment from other manufacturers.
“All of the features that we work with on Bally SDS work not only with our systems but in many cases with systems that are proprietary. One of the things we’ve been able to accomplish is to keep an open architecture so that we can work with everybody’s systems. We give proprietary developers manuals so they can interface with our system and be able to do a lot of promotional features.”
Part of the business proposition of slot data systems is their ability to add value for operators and customers. One way of achieving this is to utilise information about players in such a way that not only are marketing offers relevant to that particular player, but also that they encourage active participation by the player in the marketing exercise. One way to achieve this is by allowing the player choices about how they redeem an offer.
“A feature being offered in our casino systems is Dynamic Offer Redemption. Bally Power Promotions is essentially the ability of a player to convert their player club points into cash. Bally Power Rewards is essentially the ability for somebody to receive promotional offers. Say you come into the casino on Thursday and we put 20 or say 100 bucks into your account, or you play this much and we award you this much—promotional offers and things of that nature. Say you win a Bally Power Winners jackpot; we’ll send 40 bucks into your account. In general, Bally Power Awards will throw money into an account and that person then has that much money in there, and they can draw down pieces of it. Dynamic Offer Redemption is a different feature that instead of taking the money and throwing it into an account, we offer the customer a deal—say if they come in on a Saturday night in the month of June, when it’s your birthday, what we’re going to do is give you a promotional offer. It’s a specific offer. You come in, you put your [player] card in, you key in a pin number, and all of a sudden this offer is going to download right onto the game,” says Mr Doyle.
“We also have a random generation of awards feature. An operator can take say a thousand of its customers and randomly generate an encrypted award that then sits next to their account. When the customer comes in they can redeem it. They have no clue what they’re going to get until they do redeem it. They could get five bucks [dollars], but the advertising the operator sends out will point out the lucky players can win anything from say a guaranteed five dollars up to five thousand dollars. The random generation awards feature creates urgency; it creates offers that customers don’t want to miss. It allows operators more flexibility in their bonusing than does standard offer redemption.”
Bally SDS 11’s increased functionality includes the ability for operators to set their own parameters regarding how and when the system should issue an alarm for suspicious or untoward activity on the gaming floor.
Mr Doyle says this functionality was developed into response to real life situations that have occurred in casinos.
“There was a case for example in the Mid-West of the United States where some slot machines were erroneously set up for the wrong currency. So every US$20 bill a customer put in, the machines read at an eight to one value. The bottom line was that for that US$20 the machine showed US$160-worth of credit. During the course of the day this happened enough that they actually ran out of paper in the machines to print tickets. The casino was down tens and tens of thousands of dollars.
“Finally some customer alerted the management and said ‘I think people are cheating these machines’. It may be that the customers are going to recycle that cash in the property the next day. But the point is that the money is out the door, the customers are out the door, and the fraud has already occurred.
“With our suspicious activity reports, the casino sets the parameters. It could be for example to issue a report any time I [the casino] issue more than five tickets without any coin in or credit play on the machine, or if I issue five tickets even if there may be play in between. The alerts go off with surveillance and say ‘Hey look, you’ve got something going on with this machine that just doesn’t look right’. This allows operators to catch some of these scams before they go too far. The same thing applies to promotional credits,” explains Mr Doyle.
“We’ve seen a couple of situations—some our systems, some other people’s systems—where customers [casinos] have set up the system incorrectly so that players accidentally get a huge amount of promotional credits. The next thing you know the players are in there cashing out right and left. Our systems also have other protections to limit the maximum amount per day per customer that can be cashed out, but our additional protections with Bally SDS 11 tell the operator ‘Something strange is going on. Go out to the machine, look at the player account and see what is going on’.
We get a lot of ideas from our [operator] customers. They are the ones that drive the ideas and the concepts—things we want to add to the system. There’s no point in coming up with great concepts if nobody buys them. We’re focused always on listening, learning and adapting to what the market wants,” stresses Mr Doyle.
