COMTRADE GAMING
All about Comtrade Gaming
Bringing mature technology from an existing customer base is reaping rewards for this tech/IT company. Casino International met Aleš Gornjec, General Manager, Comtrade Gaming, to find out more about the business.
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t’s not unusual for ‘outside’ technology to eventually permeate the gaming sphere, it just usually takes time. Comtrade started life outside of gaming, but recognised fairly early on that the company had skills and products that would benefit gaming – now they are a part of the gaming IT landscape and growing fast within the industry. Ale Gornjec details the company’s journey to Casino International.
Gaming is one of them. Another is Comtrade Software, specialising in infrastructure projects – data backup, recovery, all kinds of monitoring projects within IT. The third part is Comtrade Digital Services, and this is a software development and outsourcing arm where we work for various companies in travel and hospitality; RyanAir and Lufthansa, for example; finance – we have been in e-banking for more than 20 years; and energy, in smart meters. That’s big business. When you have 5 million
meters in California, from which you have to collect readings on 15-minute intervals, it becomes a huge database and analysis opportunity to process the data. It’s simpler than monitoring gaming machines, but the volumes are bigger. We monitor gaming machines often, and our biggest installation is in New South Wales (Australia) with almost 100,000 machines. The complexity of information you get from these sorts of machines is much more complex, events rather than a single number, for example.
CI: How long has Comtrade been around? AG: The company was formed as soon as Slovenia became independent, and the Slovenian entity at that time was called Hermes Softlab. At almost the same time in Serbia, Comtrade was founded and there was a merger eight years ago, where Hermes – the biggest software company in the region – merged with Comtrade, the biggest distributor in the region. Since then we have rebranded as Comtrade and we operate under that banner.
Casino International: Comtrade is a much
larger company than just its gaming division – where does gaming sit within the company, and how is it structured? Ale Gorjnec: Comtrade is an IT organisation based
in Slovenia – well, actually Serbia, where our owner lives. We run three businesses within Comtrade, and
98 SEPTEMBER 2017 CI: What was your core business in the early
days? AG: We started out with a collaboration with
Hewlett Packard. We had several projects where we developed products that were later sold as Hewlett Packard products. That part of the business is actually ongoing; the Data Protector is one of these
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