Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | June 2010 44 legacy casinos [those built prior to market liberalisation in 2002], has recently installed its first floor management system. Properties built in Macau since 2002 have had systems installed from the beginning. But some are now reassessing their existing equipment and current and future floor management needs and are either considering replacing or are actively replacing their original systems. Winning hand The main winner in this new round of Macau competition appears to be Bally Technologies Inc. In January, Bally announced a deal with Macau casino operator Galaxy Entertainment Group (GEG) to provide comprehensive table, slot, and casino management systems across its StarWorld Hotel & Casino and Galaxy Macau properties. StarWorld Hotel & Casino, Galaxy’s flagship property on the Macau peninsula, will be the first casino in the Asia Pacific region to use Bally’s iVIEW Display Manager™ and Business Intelligence solutions. Installation was due to be completed in May. Bally also has a strategic agreement to roll out its gaming management products across several Macau gaming properties operated by SJM, Dr Stanley Ho’s casino operating business. The products include: Bally Table Management Systems™ (TMS), a suite of technologies for automated table tracking; Bally Casino MarketPlace™ (CMP) casino management software; and Bally Slot Data System® (SDS) for slot floor monitoring. Bally installed TMS, CMP and SDS at L’Arc when it opened in September last year and at Casino Oceanus at the time of its December launch. In addition, Bally went live with the 40-year- old Casino Lisboa’s first table management system earlier this year. Inside Asian Gaming caught up with Ramesh Srinivasan, Executive Vice President Systems for Bally Technologies, at the company’s 4th Asia Pacific Systems User Conference at the Venetian Macao Hotel Resort. Mr Srinivasan, one of the architects of the company’s successful systems sales campaign in Asia, gave his engaging take on the reasons for the company’s competitive edge in the systems segment. Inside Asian Gaming : Why have you had so much success in systems in the Macau market recently? Ramesh Srinivasan : I would probably say two factors: rate of improvement and Groundbreaking—StarWorld, the first Asian casino with Bally’s iVIEW Display Manager and Business Intelligence solutions Bally support and services. That’s the reason why somebody makes a momentous decision, a big decision, about moving from one system to the other. Both in terms of money and in terms of managing the transition, it’s a huge change. But when you compare us to the other vendors, the other vendors’ products are not moving forward at the rate that ours are. Five or six years ago, we made a decision to take systems very seriously. We can move forward at a much faster pace than our competitors. And that’s what customers want. They get impatient if a system has been built and supplied to them, they ask for enhancements in the light of their operational experience but five years later the system is still the same. If that happens they [the operators] feel ‘You guys are not listening to us’. For most of the vendors in this industry, systems are an afterthought— games, tables, are a much easier way tomake money—why bother with systems? The other factor is support and services. Business systems are not like consumer systems. With cell phones, or computer software such as Microsoft Excel, when you create a product you can sell 20 million copies of it. For us life is not like that. We sell maybe twenty copies of our system in a year. If you don’t like Excel, you have help desks or online forums, but you can’t call theMicrosoft engineers that actually created it. You don’t have that level of access. Here at Bally Technologies we are in direct touch with our customers. Each implementation is different. It is not an exactly repeatable process in the manner of a consumer product launch. In our case each implementation has separate challenges. So you need a lot of staying