Pulse
Acres: Future Forward Technology
By William - 7 June 2022
Patrick Bland, CTO at Acres Technology, is contributing to the IAGA Summit’s future-forward session, which aims to dive headfirst into new technologies, innovations and trends that are emerging in gaming and other markets, exploring everything from facial recognition software and its uses to local versus cloud-based hosting and the benefits and challenges of server location flexibility.
Gaming has come a long way from offering only basic three-reel slot machines and table games that didn’t require power: today’s land-based and online casinos offer a myriad of ‘innovative’ products and services that incorporate technologies that have long been standard in other industries.
However, many of these ‘cutting edge’ innovations that could enhance the gaming experience or streamline operations run into approval delays and other challenges because regulations are outdated or cumbersome, testing lags, or the industry is slow to adopt a new product without a proven ROI.
Ahead of his appearance on a future-forward session at IAGA 2022 examining new technologies, innovations and trends, Patrick Bland, CTO at Acres Technology, weighs in on the debate around local versus cloud-based hosting and the benefits and challenges of server location flexibility.
Having joined the gaming industry a year ago with a background in big tech and analytics, Patrick began our interview detailing how ‘mind-blown’ he was and remains about the outdated tech stacks being employed relative other retail industries.
YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GONNA GET
Never in a million years did I think I’d end up the gaming industry of all places. By education I’m a licensed tax attorney and I live in South Carolina where it’s illegal to even own a slot machine, so I can’t even have one in my garage to tinker with! I’ve always been an engineer at heart from writing code and building computers at seven years of age.
That skill set led to me working for a Sequoia, D.C. funded tech start-up in the legal technology space straight out of law school. Most recently, prior to joining Acres, I worked for a company called Splunk, which is involved in cybersecurity and the I.T. operations space. There, customers were dealing with massive amounts of data, ingesting 15-20 terabytes of machine data a day.
Frankly, I didn’t know who John Acres or Acres Technology were. I was an engineer at Splunk attending one of the tribal conferences walking around the expo floor. I saw this red box with serial cables hanging out the back with a little Acres background that made me stop. “It’s 2020 – why do you have that here?!”
So I sat there with John Acres and we hit it off. I was intrigued, did some work supporting Acres with Splunk and, when I heard they were looking to scale and grow, I grasped the opportunity to become CTO – Chief Nerd.
Coming to gaming as an outsider that has neither gambled or visited casinos, I saw these fancy slot machines and had the impression that the slot floor must be a sea of real-time data. Just like any other retail operator, be it Best Buy, Apple, Walmart, I assumed casinos knew more about their customers than they themselves were aware of because they’re also a 24/7, 365 retail operation.
However, I quickly found out casinos are comparatively blind about player behaviour, loyalty, and understanding their customers. After 12 months, it’s still mind blowing.
It’s like the industry has been on pause since the 90s with the tech stacks that are employed and the way they’re managed. ‘Modern’ casino operations have 30-year-old databases at the crux of everything they do – some are still using AS/400 mainframes!
The way I’ve described this to my family and friends, who don’t really get it, is by using Google Maps as an example. When you zoom out, you see the United States, the state names, borders, etc. That is your view of the world, and this is the data definition operators are using to make critical business decisions.
What Foundation provides is the Zoom function – all the way to my house in South Carolina, with my nephew picking his nose in my garage and, because it’s real-time, I can tell him to ‘stop it off.’ That’s the level of data resolution we can provide to operators.
It doesn’t have to be this batch-based, after-the- fact process using previous months’ marketing reports and sifting through mailers. The biggest and most obvious problem with this approach is that the player has already left the property.
THE BEAUTY OF A MODERN TECH STACK
On Facebook, you describe everything about yourself. For a player loyalty programme, it is simply name and address. There is no other information about the customer, let alone a favourite sports team or personal things meaningful to them that the casino can tailor experiences around.
The beauty of having a modern technology stack is that it allows operators to understand player preferences and personalisation upon which to individually tailor bonuses and loyalty. For example, I’m currently wearing an Atlanta Braves baseball cap.
One of the things Foundation offers is the ability to trigger offers based on live sportsbooks. If I’m on a property and my favourite team or player hits a home run, we can use the modern delivery mechanism – a mobile phone – to tell me to sit down at a particular slot machine to double my winnings for X amount of time.
At Acres, we want everything to be through the mobile phone, which is still not the primary mechanism in the land-based casino industry. All these loyalty and bonuses have never been able to exist, especially the real-time nature of it, because it lacked the underlying plumbing.
We have the plumbing and the data architecture to allow for new levels to be reached in incentivisation and personalisation tailored to the interests and wants of the customer.
Foundation can sit in-between any legacy management system and without disrupting any of the property’s operational aspects. We provide a real-time data feed that doesn’t exist elsewhere.
Whilst there are some other vendors with similar solutions, they aren’t capturing the amount of data we are, nor are they offering the cashless aspect (which allows Foundation to control credit meters and AFT transactions), nor the bonusing and loyalty aspects.
We are uniquely situated in the market. From a Foundation standpoint, we have the data plumbing that is non-invasive to the operating model of a casino.
A CLOUDY FUTURE
Unique to this industry is not having the luxury of providing a cloud-based SAAS delivery mechanism for our technology. We don’t own the data and work with operators to fix any potential bugs or issues because there is no real-time data feed into an Acres operating centre to be monitored.
However, this forms part of our future vision. Regulation is there for a reason, from protecting problem gamblers through to identifying correctly reported tax revenues, and this needs to be done correctly. The level of regulation doesn’t surprise me, but as an outsider coming in, I’m just blown away that cloud is not a standard.
Think of all the other retail industries where cloud is critical to how they scale and operate their business. Here we are, in a retail sector, and everything is operating from 30-year-old technology. No real-time access at all. I’ve lived in this world before and now it feels like I’ve gone back in time.
Regulatory bodies have previously had a propensity to not leverage cloud-based solutions, but that stance is changing following Covid. A few weeks ago, Nevada opened itself up to permitting SAAS cloud-based solution providers, enabling wagering accounts outside of the state.
We’re getting to an inflection point from a regulatory standpoint to allow for SAAS. I’d absolutely love it if all we had to do was plot the hardware into a customer site that is able to gather the data and ship it to us.
Not only would that mean less bodies required to manage a tech stack they aren’t familiar with, but we can also provide proactive services to help with the floor, as well as a host of other potential interesting use cases with the data at our fingertips.
As well as helping operators make better business decisions, we can use a real-time live data feed to improve the quality of our product and monitor the health of all our systems. I’d love to reach this hypothetical point, but there are regulatory changes required. We will one day for sure.
What’s funny is that the federal government here in the United States is further along its cloud adoption cycle than the gaming industry.
PRIVACY LAWS & ELASTIC SCALE
In Europe, there are much stricter data protection and privacy laws than in the US. I’m no expert in data privacy law, but I don’t think there is any state-specific data sovereignty just so long as it’s kept in the United States. A change in where data and servers are located requires a regulatory mind shift.
The passing of the law in Las Vegas means those systems are no longer required to stay within the gaming authority of the state. If, from a regulatory standpoint, they are okay with it being in the US, especially when we’re talking about US-based operators, then it becomes more of a technical discussion than regulatory.
If all properties in Northern California are using Northern Virginia datacentres there is an inherent latency. If you want to provide a real- time, low latency and, ultimately, a better customer experience, you want to have your cloud solution stacked in a region where most of your properties are operating from.
Another thing to consider is the ability to elastically scale up and down without having to make substantial investments in hardware that could be under-utilised.
Because operators are trying to plan several years ahead, they may spend tens of millions of dollars on a sports system that hits the maximum threshold of performance in two years. Don’t forget these are very data intensive applications coming through the pipeline.
As these systems are older, the I.T. staff hiring trend is also different. Operators aren’t looking for technologists and engineers who know modern streaming platforms or ETL pipelines that go into current data intensive applications, but someone who understands Oracle Database or SQL Server. It’s an interesting hiring gap.
A cloud solution leveraging modern technology, which provides a low latency, real-time customer experience, means we can manage the complexity. The operator doesn’t have to lay a finger on it. We can make the connectivity happen.
From a security standpoint, a rising tide raises all boats. That isn’t to say that cloud servers are never going to be attacked, but nine times out of 10 they are going to be way more secure than those used internally by operators. There are many benefits that come from leveraging a modern cloud solution.
EDUCATING OPERATORS ABOUT CASHLESS BENEFITS
Penn has got a cashless piece, 3Cs Technology, that Everi plays a substantial part in and we power the data and cashless transfer functionality. There has been an interesting paradigm shift insofar as we are educating operators as to why this is the way of the future. You don’t need to own the entire stack.
Returning to regulation for a moment, it is very unusual for them to be reviewing, certifying, and approving a multi-vendor system. There has been a lot of apprehension that has seen some jurisdictions more eager to move forwards than others, and that’s understandable.
There have been delays because they are trying to wrap their heads around how to apply existing regulatory regimes if they need to be modified. Several states have been changing cashless codified statutes and laws. 12 months ago, we weren’t licensed anywhere and now we’ve got nine or 10 licences including Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan – essentially following Penn wherever they go.
We are expecting to have all 40,000 or so machines Penn has and, as such, to be licensed in every single one of those states. Of course, alongside all of this we are also working with other customers. We are laying the groundwork.
Due to the 90s operating model that the industry works in, we don’t have insights into the data we are generating. However, Penn has recently released their investors call demonstrating the benefits of having cashless after measuring 60 days before and after implementing the system.
From 53,000 cashless (mywallet) customers, Penn recorded an 18 per cent increase in the number of trips to the property and a 22 per cent rise in time-on-device. These are just some of the tangible operator benefits we are seeing in customer data from adopting a modern cashless approach and multi-party systems.
A MODERN ALTERNATIVE
A lot of what I’ve done since I joined Acres, not just with Foundation but with building first floor applications such as bonusing, player loyalty, cashless reconciliation – all the things we are going to need to build our own CMS – is to be a modern alternative from the legacy vendors.
The monolithic legacy vendors such as Bally’s, Light & Wonder, IGT, and Konami want to own everything from the slot machine to the reports. There is nothing modular nor any open APIs, leading to a lot of frustrated customers because they have a tight grip on them and whereby they can’t change anything.
Foundation is a completely open ecosystem. We have open APIs and don’t charge technology vendors. It is an unusual approach and breaks the industry mould.
Instead of the meat cleaver approach that you must transfer all data at one time, we can do this in real-time with minimal impact on operators.
It’s been fun. I’ve taken great joy in trying to architect the provision of a modern data stack on primitive data types in the knowledge that five years from now we can take what we’re currently building and transition seamlessly. Then we’re off to the races.
