As the Indian Gaming Association conference in San Diego in late March approaches, Quick Custom Intelligence reiterates that its QCI Enterprise Platform scales from small to large operators, making QCI a great partner for casinos of all sizes.
The QCI Enterprise Platform aligns player development, marketing, and gaming in what the company calls powerful real-time operational tools developed for the gaming industry. All QCI products are built on the QCI Enterprise Platform that enables fully coordinated activities across a gaming enterprise.
A year ago, at the Indian Gaming Tradeshow & Convention in Anaheim, QCI announced the latest upgrades to its platforms.
Andrew Cardno, QCI’s Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, wants to stress that an interesting aspect of QCI’s Enterprise Edition is its ability to homogenize data streaming from the many sources and systems in a casino resort. That means QCI can bring data from across the entire enterprise, providing the QCI user community with a coherent view of their players’ customer journey.
“Our job is to be innovative, build great tech and provide tools the best that we can,” Cardno said. “One of the great challenges we have is with all the various properties differing in size – properties with 30 machines, 800 machines and even greater amounts on the Las Vegas Strip – but we’re bound by that goal of innovation.”
QCI has the tooling to support the different scales of deployments and takes advantage of the technology for internal use, providing the QCI team with real-time updates about the system’s performance at every property. If there’s an issue with training or an area of technology that’s not functioning properly, our team knows before a property does, said Cardno.
“That allows us to adapt and innovate to drive real value in an ongoing way,” he said. “We have more than 100 resorts in North America, and the number of casinos is double that. With the large and diverse deployments from some of the biggest gaming organizations in North America to some of the smallest, we have got to be able to provide a platform where we can support, innovate and continue to provide value without getting caught up in customization of software—that’s what our new platform allows us to do.”
Cardno said he’s learned a lot after doing this for 20 years, and QCI remains disciplined by having one highly configurable version of its software for everyone. While there’s a diverse range of needs with an operator having more than 10,000 gaming machines across multiple properties compared to those with 400 to 500, they run on the same QCI Enterprise Platform, he said.
“The first key to who we are at QCI is we are software as a service company,” Cardno said. “Our job is to make one incredibly flexible and powerful piece of software that allows this huge range of scale and size to function well. This first key requires discipline, and discipline is hard.”
To maintain discipline, Cardno explained that QCI has to say no to writing custom code for new features and customization requests. Instead, Cardno informs the customer that QCI can add the requested functionality as a general feature in the next software release.
The second key to doing scalability is having good alerts. In the past, when Cardno said he’s had a system running inside a casino’s firewall and the data stream goes down or a source system stops providing correct data, it may appear to be working, but due to the nature of the data, this approach doesn’t work.
“QCI Enterprise Platform has alerts that run data behavioral testing to verify whether the system is running properly or not,” Cardno said. “These alerts look at the nature and type of the data so that, as the system is running and something goes out of bounds, the alert goes directly to the QCI Support Team with a notice to the customer that something has gone wrong. These alerts have been incredibly powerful.”
The system allows for setting up a robust business partnership where QCI is responsive to the ongoing needs of the business. Imagine being a casino that figures out after two weeks that the data used for a marketing program is wrong. QCI’s monitoring alert system would have notified the support team, who can resolve it before the data is used, Cardno said.
“Incorrect data is not a fun discussion to have, and we’re getting ahead of that,” Cardno said. “We’re pushing this, and what happens when you do this is people get confidence in the system, data and reliability. Imagine 20 source systems and all the things that can go wrong. We’re operating in an environment where our data can be higher quality than the source systems because it’s constantly being monitored. We’re adding value to the data, and that generates trust from the business users. We can say to our customers that we’re doing all of this work to make sure your data is continuously verified to be accurate.”
A big focus of the company today is QCI’s Enterprise Platform that is being actively deployed and working with many large operators, Cardno said. Its platform in version 5.1 is now “truly an enterprise environment.” That helps with a 360-degree view of the business and sees all of the data together, he added.
QCI has extensive experience with a vast range of source systems, including online gaming, sportsbooks, bingo rooms, hotel, food and beverage, and digital marketing.
“The QCI Enterprise Platform is relevant to any scale of operation,” Cardno said. “Almost every resort in the world now has the challenge of how the many sources of data integrate in a robust, scalable and supportable way.”
