The recently unveiled Xia lays the foundation for TCSJOHNHUXLEY’s future
TCSJOHNHUXLEY laid out its roadmap for convergence at the International Casino Exhibition held in London in February. The centerpiece of the TCS stand was the Xia platform, based around the Xia Tablet, which in its current form enables players to place bets on live roulette via a touchscreen tablet device but is poised to offer a whole lot more.
Over the next 24 months, TCS aims to incorporate Supernova and Gaming Floor Live into the Xia platform. Supernova is a floorwide progressive and bonusing system covering all live table games, including roulette, which is an industry first, the company says. Gaming Floor Live is a data-base-driven game optimization tool designed to maximize key performance areas and profitability. The integration of Supernova and Gaming Floor Live with the Xia Tablet will create, in the company’s words, “a single, unique market-leading casino system that is modular and scalable, meeting the needs of small casinos right up to multinational group customers”.
Group CEO Cath Burns said, “Our focus over the last nine months has been about bringing our products together and building for the future. We see Xia as the beginning of looking at our platforms to create a single market system. Imagine an integrated gaming system that links all live tables, across all game types, played on multiple devices, with mystery jackpots and progressives, with yield management, centralised media distribution, reporting and security. All this, built around the Internet and a multi-site infrastructure designed to bridge both traditional and e-gaming spaces. It’s a very exciting prospect.”
Supernova Roulette and Blackjack
The new roadmap also incorporates TCSJOHNHUXLEY’s core products. The development team is working on enhancements to traditional offerings such as the Chipper Champ chip sorter and the company’s famed roulette wheels and displays based on customer and market requirements by region. It’s all part of the company’s ongoing mission to keep its products at the forefront of innovation, reliability and profitability for the customer.
Inside Asian Gaming stopped by the TCS stand at ICE and spoke to Director of Marketing Luke Davis about the company’s mission.
IAG: Your big focus at the show this year seems to be the Xia platform. What’s it all about?
Mr Davis: Xia is the start of our new platform of convergence. The goal is to have one platform that brings together our tablet gaming device, now known as Xia Tablet; Supernova, which is our progressive and mystery bonusing system for tables; and Gaming Floor Live, our table optimization system, which is very much a data-base driven product that captures live data and uses it to drive best use of your gaming tables and resources, increase revenues and reduce costs.
Ultimately, Xia will be a platform that will bring lots of different live tables together from blackjack and baccarat to poker and roulette with progressive and mystery bonuses. You can then bring it onto an electronic platform to deliver live content, whilst bridging into i-gaming spaces, like internet gaming. Consequently you can bring table profitability, data management, security and then other linked systems such as multi-device, multi-venue, all under one banner, where you can turn on and off what’s suitable and scalable to the operator. So that’s our convergence story over the next two years.
How long has this been in the works? When did the concept first take shape?
This is all part of the big change that Cath Burns, TCSJOHNHUXLEY’s new CEO, has brought to the business over the nine months that she’s been here. It’s about looking at our offering, understanding the full potential of our intellectual property, augmenting our strengths and plugging the holes in our weaknesses, consequently shaping the company and building a brighter future. As you walk around our stand you see it is already taking shape. For example, we’ve added numerous key hires, people with proven track records in delivering production innovation, from backgrounds covering databases and table management, slots as well as the live gaming environment. With all these spaces starting to converge, this new talent integrating with our strong existing team will drive and focus our product direction going forward.
We’ve also spent time defining our core values. And I know this can soon sound typically corporate and sound like we are just ticking off the boxes, but we’ve conducted this in a fun and very meaningful way. Some companies just go along to a PR agency, and say we need values that result in a booklet full of buzzwords, but that’s not the way Cath inspired us to do it. What Cath’s done is gone out and engage with the entire business, from the shop floor to the boardroom and asked, “What do you stand for? What sort of person are you? What is important to you? What are your values in life—family, religion, respect, knowledge, power, wealth, health? What is it in life that drives you? Who do you want to be at work? How do you want your peers to see and think of you? How do you treat others and how do you expect to be treated? And how, as a company, should we treat our customers?
It’s looking at all those angles. Everybody was asked to submit his or her individual voice into the company, dawning nine core values that we now take pride in. Values like customer focused, innovation, commitment to employee growth and success, even values that can be overlooked such as have fun, because if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, then you’re not going to be at the best of your game.
Our new Core Values are instilled in all that we do. We challenge and measure each other against them. With this approach, everyone in the business is buying into what is required to really drive a change through the company. It’s changing the inner essence of where we are, who we are, how we work with each other and where we’re taking it. What we’re building is a big, powerful proposition, and it’s all focused on the customer, continuous improvement through software, and ultimately hardware that’s all going to be delivered to the same high standards that you’d expect from TCSJOHNHUXLEY.
It seems TCS has recently hired a lot of slots people. Is there a rationale for that?
There is a reason for that. As we develop our business and product portfolio its important we add the correct length and breadth of skills and knowledge. Having a wide range of accomplished professionals from all sectors of the industry is making a significant difference to our business. This input is already proving very successful. In fact a fine example is Macau where we’re embedding Omni Displays into Gaming Floor Live on baccarat to maximize table efficiency, consequently saving a towering amount of money for the operator. If you have visibility of enough data and knowledge to refine and optimize your processes even a tiny amount, you are more likely to save and make more money. Think about just a 1-2% optimization on the scale of Macau table revenues, what does that actually add up to? Even on a small portion of your product mix that adds up to a significant and positive change to profitability.
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