NEWS The rules of attraction Because no one firm can meet all the requirements of today’s casino, vendors are teaming up
Alliances among the vendors of gaming technology are nothing new, but after the latest round of wedding bells, the crisscross of partnerships is making a European royal’s family tree look simple by comparison. Consider, for example, Leap Forward Gaming, a Reno company founded by Ali Saffari, a long-service veteran of International Game Technology (IGT) who is credited with several innovations that have helped shaped today’s casino floor. Leap Forward is involved in game development, but it also has a strong interest in wireless technologies that can make communications among different parts of a casino’s gaming and IT systems simpler to set up and manage. Because wireless is an enabling technology – one that lets you do other stuff more effectively, rather than an end in itself – Leap Forward needs to work with the companies whose products do useful things on the floor or in the back office. And to this end it has signed three separate deals recently, with table-game specialist Shuffle Master, cash-handling technology firm JCM, and printer maker TransAct Technologies. The first fruits of all three partnerships are expected in the spring. “Our initial area of collaboration will focus on
Acquisition is one way to combine strengths, but it’s not the answer for those who just want to address specific customer needs
8 DECEMBER 2010
wireless progressive solutions for the casino floor,” said Jim Jackson, Senior VP of Business Development for Shuffle Master. But both firms have ambitions beyond that. “Shuffle Master and Leap Forward share a vision that the gaming floor of the future will be wireless,” added Saffari, Leap Forward’s CEO. The TransAct and JCM deals, similarly, are likely to lead to the addition of wireless capability to their printing and cash- handling kit. Leap Forward is a
relatively niche player among casino suppliers, albeit an innovative one. But it is not only the little guys who are seeing the benefits of teaming up. Two of the dominant names in
the sector, WMS Gaming and Saffari’s alma mater IGT, made a point at the recent Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas of demonstrating the interoperability of their systems, using the Game-to-System (G2S) protocol championed by the Gaming Standards Association (GSA). That protocol specifies how individual games should talk to centralised systems, the goal being that if they speak the same language, it should be easier to link together equipment from different vendors. And that’s exactly what the two companies were highlighting by connecting IGT’s sbX Media Manager and FreedomPort Player User Interface to WMS’s Wage-Net networked gaming system.
“This is the latest example of interoperability and co-operation between manufacturers to provide operators with a glimpse into another level of flexibility and choice for their floors,” said Chris Satchell, IGT’s Chief Technology Officer. “Expanding the options for application delivery in the game screen was a logical next step in our collaboration with WMS.” Or, putting it a blunter way, “this approach ensures our windowing and application platforms are able to co-exist”, as WMS’s Chief Innovation Officer Larry Pacey said. Indeed, IGT in particular seems keen on co- existence with all and sundry. It has made available a software development kit (SDK) that Satchell describes as “our latest step toward building an ecosystem of player and operator applications for the server-based floor”, allowing third-party vendors and casino operators’ own IT departments alike to create applications enhancing IGT’s systems by automating processes previously carried out manually, or delivering extra services and bonuses to players. Among the first to sign up is Synergy Blue, sister company to gaming integrator Synergy Information Solutions. Other recent technology partnerships go to the
heart of the gaming experience. Aristocrat Technologies and Bally Technologies, for example, are continuing to work together on technology, again GSA-protocol-compliant, that intriguingly will “enable casino operators to create a picture-in- picture-style interface on the gaming device to differentiate their slot products, regardless of the manufacturer”. Founded on Aristocrat’s nCompass and Bally’s iView Display Manager, it will even be backward-compatible so that it works on older machines.
The Aristocrat-Bally relationship is no whirlwind
romance. “Our companies have worked very well together on our download-and-configuration products and in demonstrating the power of
implementing the picture-in-picture-style interface with this approach,” said Bruce Rowe, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Business Development for Bally, and Aristocrat’s President Nick Khin agreed that the pair “have very similar views of both the current and future technology needs of our gaming system customers”. For some tech suppliers, however, entering into a
partnership can be a more sudden affair – particularly when it takes the form of an outright takeover, as it did in the case of the UK’s Innocore Gaming and Taiwan’s Advantech. Advantech has acquired Innocore, previously the subject of a management buyout in 2006, to create what it says will be the biggest PC supplier to the gaming industry. Among other Guinness-worthy stats, it boasts of a combined engineering and research-and-development team of more than 600 people, as well as 67,000 square metres of manufacturing facilities in China and Taiwan. Acquisition is an old and tested way to combine
the strengths of two companies, and it’s not the answer for those – such as IGT and its tech partners (see box), or Aristocrat and Bally – that simply want to act together on answering specific customer needs, rather than blend their entire operations. But whichever form of marriage they choose, don’t expect the wedding bells to stop ringing for suppliers any time soon.
IGT’s nuts and bolts
Not all partnerships are about developing new products: sometimes, the objective is to incorporate existing equipment that does one job well into a bigger system that does a bit of everything.
For example, besides teaming up with WMS and issuing a software development kit, IGT has also named two technology partners, FutureLogic and JCM, whose products – the Gen2 Universal and Gen3 Evolution printers, and the iVizion bank-note validator, respectively – it will integrate with its own in most of its installations worldwide. “IGT’s decision to specify our TITO [ticket-in, ticket-out] printers validates our commitment to player research, our close collaboration with our electronic gaming machine customers and regulatory agencies, and our dedication to the development of ‘future-proof’ peripherals for this rapidly evolving industry,” said Nick Micalizzi, FutureLogic’s VP of Domestic Sales and Marketing.
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