Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | October 2010 34 Talking Heads R amesh Srinivasan, executive vice president of systems at Bally Technologies, discusses the path Bally Systems has taken since he joined it, and where the division is headed today and into the future. How is Bally Systems doing, given that many believe the recession is turning the corner? Ramesh Srinivasan: We have been lucky enough to have more than doubled our annual revenue levels during the past five years. We have seen a slower level of growth during the past couple of years—but most experts will agree that any growth under the current circumstances is pretty good. Our Systems backlog and pipeline numbers are at record levels now. Our win-loss ratio in value terms has never been better. All the hard work we have done during the past few years of carrying our core products to world-class technology levels, re-engineering them with scalable, open, interoperable, reliable, and configurable architectures and creating many new innovative solutions around them—is beginning to pay off very well for both our current and new customers. The inflection point is just around the corner— and that is very satisfying and thrilling—for Bally and our customers. What factors do you attribute to Bally Systems’ success? There are three major factors that contributed to our relative success. Attention to core products: Our customers made us understand clearly that the future wave of new and innovative technologies that the gaming industry is about to witness can only be built on a very strong foundation of reliable and scalable foundation slot, player tracking, and table- management systems. The fact that we paid attention to that, and re-engineered them where they needed to be, has been a big factor. Most of our re-engineering tasks were completed in our Version 11 product releases—of which there are more than 200 installations in the field today. Rate of Improvement: I have been in the world of Business Systems across multiple industries for about 23 years now—and there is one lesson that I learned very early. Inmost walks in life, especially in theworld of Business Systems, it almost does not matter how good we are today. The only thing that matters is howgoodwe are at improving. It is all about continuous improvement. I suspect that our rate of improvement during the past few years has been much better than our competition, which has been key. Services and Support: It is very hard to create perfect Business Systems products. Our success has had a lot to do with the fact we took Services and Support very seriously and never neglected current-day issues just because we were also spending a lot of time and resources building out a viable technology path for the future. We surrounded our fast-improving products with great customer-centric support and services people equipped with state-of-the- art customer support systems—and that was crucial to our success. And when was Version 11 introduced? Version 11 of most of our products was released during the second half of calendar 2009. This version—across almost our entire set of product lines—has helped provide Bally and our customers with the kind of solid core foundation on which the future innovations can be built successfully on. It is now a lot easier for us to implement new and innovative solutions like the Bally Command Center—the centerpiece of our server-based gaming solutions—Business Intelligence, Live Floor View, CoolSign and iVIEW DM. That has been one of the reasons for Bally being the no. 1 winner of the global gaming technology awards during the past couple of years. How well has that gone? The Version 11 installs have gone reasonably well. The first few installs of some of those products were bumpy—and that is not entirely surprising given the extent of re-engineering efforts involved in creating them—and now that we have gotten past virtually all of those challenges—progress is flowing normally. I cannot wait for the next 12 to 24 months. The next few years are going to be very exciting. So it sounds like you’re not used to resting on your laurels. Life in Business Systems will never allow anyone who truly cares the luxury of resting on one’s laurels. Business Systems will always remain a humbling experience for everyone involved. We clearly understand that there is a long path ahead of us to reach the goals we set for ourselves a few years ago. It is very possible that one very successful phase is coming to an end now—giving way to the next phase where we can really help this industry reach world-class technology levels with the kind of automation and exciting new marketing Ramesh Srinivasan From Core to Cool How Bally Systems transformed itself from back-room workhorse to technology powerhouse, developing content-driven products designed to deliver a competitive edge to its casino customers