Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | June 2010 46 Sea change—Bally systems installed in SJM’s new Casino Oceanus Bally power, a lot of patience. Customer support and service becomes very important. In our view the other [systems] vendors are not taking that as seriously as we are. Changing a floor management system is a big step financially and organisationally for casinos. What makes them decide to do it? That’s a good question. It comes down to the operator’s level of impatience with the status quo. If you as an operator want to try new things in a management and operational sense on the floor, you may find that your existing system isn’t giving you that flexibility. In that case you’re going to look at the suppliers you think will give you that level of flexibility and innovation. The analogy I use is this. I’m a hotel owner and buy a chair from you. Every day I sit on it and I’m happy with it. But if I’m a very dynamic kind of hotel owner, I may want to change the colour of the chair frequently to match a change of décor or design in the hotel. If you as the chair supplier say ‘Sorry, can’t do it’, that causes problems. So exacting customers, who want changes, want enhancements, want things to be done, they get tired of your product very fast. What enhancements to casino management systems are we taking about? More data, more ability to dig down into the data? It’s not only about more detailed data, it’s also about more promotional tools and about my system being able to do more things for my customer. For example, I think a factor in StarWorld’s decision to use Bally systems technology was L’Arc going live with our system. When you see a neighbouring casino has access to new tools via its management system, you want that as well. And it’s not just about the present, it’s about where an operator wants to be in systems terms in one or two years from now. An operator wants to know whether the gap between his or her existing system and that of a competing system is going to get bigger and bigger and whether that means the operator is going to get left behind in the market. A way of measuring that from a casino operator’s perspective is how many times they have raised issues with their system supplier and how well the supplier reacts. If the operator feels they’re not getting the service they need, they get nervous. They start to think ‘I better make the switch now, rather than waiting another year or two’. Are there any other systems suppliers that are going head-to-head with you in this area? Absolutely. We had one case where a big customer left us for a competitor for exactly the reasons I mentioned. They got tired. The operator was telling us about improvements they wanted to see in Bally SDS and we didn’t have engineers to get it done at that time—this was back in 2006 The operator moved to IGT. Four years later, they moved back to us. It works both ways, but when our competitors do presentations on competitive replacements they often show what happened four or five years ago. In our presentations, we show competitive replacements we have done in the last 24 months. The trend has definitely been towards us in the last couple of years. And it’s up to us to keep it that way. Is the work and research to maintain your competitive edge coming out of the R&D centres in India or is it global? We started our India operation because we wanted more R&D capacity across the board. At that time, we had about 400 people in systems. Now we have about 950. It’s not only from India. We have added about 15 more people to our systems operation in the US. Trying to run any R&D operation below capacity is the exact equal of not having enough doctors to run a hospital. Patients come in, you’re nice to the patient, but there’s no doctor to fix the disease, to create more medicine, or come up with new techniques. At that time we were losing money as a company, but the investment in the India centre was cost effective. We needed hundreds more people, and that kind of talent, in that kind of mass quantity, is not easy to hire in the US. Number one, they are costly and number two, places like Las Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City, are not primarily technology centres. My boss, Dick Haddrill [President and CEO of Bally Technologies], and I and several colleagues had started Indian R&D