Insight
GLI EUROPE INTERVIEW John van Schaijk
John van Schaijk, Technical Director, GLI Europe
John van Schaijk joined GLI Europe as Technical Director in January 2012. With more than 20 years of experience in the gaming industry Van Schaijk formerly served as Director of Product Management for WMS Gaming in Spain. Previously, he was with Orion Gaming as Product Manager and as Product Development Manager. When WMS acquired Orion in 2006, Van Schaijk remained responsible for the Orion product line and developed and launched new platforms and themes for the company. As Technical Director, John oversees engineering in GLI Europe’s labs, along with GLI’s contribution with Verispect and the Justice Department for the Dutch market.
Delivering fast, flexible and efficient working practices
“Rather than just engaging with a client at the end of the product development cycle, we’re supporting clients at the outset, conducting workshops and looking at new developments both in terms of technology and regulation. We see lots of great products that won’t launch because they were created in isolation. At GLI, we bring our expertise to the process at the earliest possible stage to help our clients get to where they want to go.”
GLI Europe’s Technical Director ensures the full resources of GLI are shared between a team of technical experts that span across Spain, Italy, South Africa and Holland, each delivering localised solutions with global scale
By his own admission, John van Schaijk has been in the gaming industry “a long time,” a history that began in 1987 when John joined the Netherlands- based gaming company, Errel Games. Originally involved in games development, John found his forte was in both product management and latterly, international sales. In 1999, John moved to another Dutch games house, Orion Gaming, where he led the product development department and R&D for seven years before the company was eventually acquired by WMS Gaming. In the hands of its US owners, John worked with Orion and WMS to integrate the two platforms before moving into another product management role, working for WMS from the company’s Barcelona-based European hub.
It was a call from then GLI Europe Managing Director, Phillip Barrow, to join the team as Technical Director that persuaded John back to the Netherlands, though he still calls Barcelona home and regularly commutes between Italy, South Africa, Spain and Holland to oversee the technical operations of GLI Europe.
“On a day to day basis, I run the technical engineering department for each of the GLI Europe offices, though in fact it’s the technical managers who are hands-on within each location,” explains John. “My role is to ensure each team is working effectively and
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efficiently, sharing and dividing the workload and putting resources where they are most needed.”
Weekly operational meetings with each technical team ensures that GLI continues to meet the expectations of its global client base. Splitting the overall workload between each office, as opposed to dedicated regional offices solely working upon local or regional caseloads, has produced huge gains for GLI and its clients. “Spreading our workload across multiple offices has improved our efficiency, speeded up the entire process and spread the risk,” states John. “By risk I mean that we now have universal expertise across each and every office. We don’t have dedicated teams for land-based and i-gaming or any market sector, we train our engineers so that they are experts in all fields. I oversee a team of over 100 engineers in Spain, Italy, South Africa and Holland. I can call on any team, and any individual within that team, to work on any project at any time, knowing that we have the capability in place to answer that call.”
Te need to create these fast, flexible and efficient working practices to service both existing and new clients is borne from a desire to seize the raw opportunities John and his teams see developing across all segments of the business. “Tere are always new jurisdictions opening, especially in i-gaming
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