Casino-systems operators gearing up for G2E are touting their technology integrations with third parties to support the customer experience.
Ted Keenan, Gaming Systems VP of Product Management at Aristocrat Interactive, said nobody can operate a system alone; thus, there’s always integration.
“We have hundreds of different integrations with third parties,” Keenan said as part of a recent technology conference that discussed offerings ahead of G2E. “Critical to those integrations is how we can do them more efficiently. When you come to us with an integration request, how quickly can we respond to that and work effectively with those third parties?”
The first Step is open APIs, published, maintained, and given to a third party so they can integrate with their systems, Kennan said. Aristocrat has to be flexible to write or modify APIs that call into a third-party system.
“The second step is the quality of the data, where we get to the point that the fidelity is there for any third party,” Keenan said. “Fidelity means how we get that real time handle-by-handle pull out to third parties.”
The third component to any integration is determining how to collaborate with third parties to ensure the integrations will work, and continue to, even after Aristocrat does upgrades, Keenan said.
“Aristocrat has a partner program where we open up a sandbox for our vendors to test against specific customer configurations,” Keenan said. “That allows operators to have confidence that before they upgrade, they can test all the integrations.”
Jon Wolfe, president of Global Systems and Services at Light & Wonder, said his background was working as a small provider that needed these integrations to provide a lot of new capabilities. “At Light & Wonder, we’re heavily committed to working with third parties. We know we won’t do everything perfectly. It’s our job to make the integrations better and complement them appropriately.”
Wolfe said they have a team of more than 20 people that does nothing but integrations and testing on a daily basis and they’re getting a new project almost every day.
“This is a constant topic with us and we’re highly invested in working with all of our partners and your partners to make this successful,” Wolfe said. “Casino operators have developed some systems in house, because they have unique needs, and it’s up to us to provide tools to integrate those systems internally and use that data to further their cause.”
Jacob Lanning, IGT’s senior director of business development, payments, said integration is core to what they do. Several years ago, Aristocrat built a global technology-integration center in Reno where more than 125 vendors have been certified across their platform for a wide variety of integrations. It’s core for casino operations to have this whether it’s a hotel system, food and beverage or a spa system.
“We launched our next-generation modernized platform Advantage X and one of the central things was how we changed the way data is created and leveraged across the system and by third parties,” Lanning said. “We’ve created this external-event service that publishes all that data and handle pulls in a contextual way, so that different tech suppliers can build relevant and unique applications that drive customer needs. We can’t build everything for everyone, but we can be great stewards of the data and leverage that to drive great results for operators. Our next Advantage X platform has those data integrations built in from the start, and we’re excited to see where it goes in the future,” Lanning said.
Chad Hoehne, the founder, president and CEO of Table Trac, has been doing product integrations with his system for 30 years. They start with the desire of customers.
“You’re driving the bus. You tell us who you want to connect with and we connect with them,” Hoehne said. “Thank goodness for APIs, because they’re pretty much universal in the way we talk to one another. In using API, our system is built from the ground up. The users at work stations are using APIs to interact with our system. Our third-party connections can use a lot of those same connections to query data and find out player names and addresses and all of the other things.”
Wolfe said the casino system operators need to do a good job of partnering with one another, because they have projects in common. Historically, companies have struggled with how to work together on behalf of casinos.
“We’re getting better at that,” Wolfe said. “I would like to see more standards come into place where everyone’s not a one-off. Talking about everyone doing it the same way would make things go a lot faster and easier.”
