INTERVIEW


you isn’t it – you were heading up Bally’s systems division for a while in Nice, France originally. MH: I’ve done the gamut – I started on the systems side for Bally. When Gavin (Isaacs) sent me to Amsterdam in 2011, they gave me the Bally slot business as well. I spent most of my childhood in Las Vegas and have been familiar with casinos since I was about 10 years old; that’s over 40 years of my life. The table products came into the fold when we acquired SHFL entertainment. I’m very familiar with the WMS side of the business and the markets they were in as well, so it’s quite a natural progression and a challenge in terms of running a bigger business with such a vast portfolio. At the same time, the past 16 months have been incredibly exciting.


CI: It makes sense, with the systems


background, for you to make this move. Systems always seemed such a big part of Bally. MH: On the Bally side, in the large casino


enterprises we dominated completely. If you look at the largest casinos in the world, we had something like a 50 percent market share of that segment. In the smaller casino segments, there are a lot more competitors. We acquired a lot of systems over the years to deal with that, such as the Bally Multi- Connect in the UK, Micro Clever Computing in France, and we were very successful with those systems. Systems is a different business, though there are, of course, areas of overlap with slots. In the systems business, customer relations are key; the sales cycle tends to be very long; it’s not about one sale, it’s about 10 or 15 years of support and maintenance and making sure we are helping them run their business. It’s such an essential part of running a business, you can’t afford downtime or many issues. It’s really something operators need to help deliver operating efficiencies and incremental revenue; they don’t want to deal with issues. You constantly have to offer operators great partnership and support or you won’t have success.


CI: With merging the companies together, has it


created an opportunity to improve the communication between WMS devices, Bally devices, Shuffle Master tables potentially, and the back-office system? MH: You’ve hit on a key thing there. In the end, we


have tremendous potential of integration in the tables business; clearly being in the systems business for a very long time, the mentality has always been that the systems have to be open, they have to interface with every currency counter, kiosk, device, machine – you have to have an open architecture depending on what the operator wants to do. That’s been a philosophy we have always had.


If you look at the Shuffle Master business, the


dream, the ideal of what the business should become is to have all of this rich information that you’re able to see thanks to the technology of systems on the slot side. It’s always been the


Add-on products for tables, like our operator wide-


area progressive product, recently installed in Grosvenor’s UK casinos, is the biggest installation in the world of its type with 107 tables connected. So we can take a traditional table and add a progressive to it and that adds tremendous value, and quite a bit of revenue as well.


CI: Given how competitive the market is, what’s your USP? MH: A change in philosophy can have a


tremendous impact. We want to give each individual customer specialised solutions. It starts with understanding what the customer needs, across the board, and that means listening to customers and then partnering with them to help them succeed. That is Scientific Games’ mission: to empower our customers by creating the world’s best gaming and lottery experiences.


APRIL 2016 31 Other hardware innovations on display was


Twinstar, which made its European debut at ICE. This new cabinet dual-screen leverages the state-of-the-art ArgOS operating system to combine the best technology and game content from WMS and Bally, giving casino operators the flexibility to adapt it based on their players’ preferences.


The dream will come together. Ultimately, the


dream is to have, even on a live table, RFID chips and all of the things you can do to automate a lot of what’s going on to make the dealer’s job a little easier. Analysis is a big part of that; we want to have the business intelligence you have for slots on the table side as well. We want to introduce more of the proprietary table games that financially were very successful in 2015. To add to the table, where you have the same traditional games that have been around for decades, is a major objective of ours and we will continue to do that.


I think the convergence of mobile and all of these


technologies will come and we will see technologies integrated and talking to each other, and that will be very helpful.


challenge; how do you rate those players at the tables, how do you do player tracking, ticketing, all of those things with players at the tables? The electronic table format lends itself so much to that; clearly we are going to focus a lot on integration into that technology with systems. That will give us a unique advantage over other systems providers.


We’ve been working on it. We have things we have been creating on the tables’ side; we have a middleware product that allows us to collect data from all of the various table devices – shuffler, chipper, electronic roulette – to provide rich analysis on the table side as well. We showed this for the first time at ICE 2016. I think you will start seeing some leaps in that technology in the next 12 months.


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