GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 24 - April 2013

how I use my computer. It’s a different type of demographic, with overlap, is my suspi- cion. I would suspect on the casino side of things that their experience is very much the same. Shorter sessions, more frequent- ly. More during the day, or during business hours, let’s say, than off-business hours. Q:The interesting thing about the mobile product is it’s allowed you to extend the revenue sessions throughout the day, as opposed to hitting the peaks and valleys. JAQUES: Increase the number of them, the frequency of them. I think there are new players who are playing mobile who maybe wouldn’t have played so much without mo- bile, and then there’s the ability for play- ers who are playing already to increase the amount of play that they have. It’s bothways. Q:There’s a sense that the mobile prod- uct has increased the number of new customers, and new acquisitions, and casual players. JAQUES: It’s not just hype, I would say. There is something to getting it in your business model. About doing it right. I don’t think if you just throw any old prod- uct out there that you have success. You have to know what you’re doing. You have to cater the product. Q:Talk a little bit about the development process for the mobile poker product and what you had to go through to make sure you got it right, and the different factors you were taking into account to make sure you got it right. KJELL: Like I said earlier, we have been developing mobile products for eight years. With that in mind, that product has always worked with the same liquidity as our reg- ular poker system. Back then it was very important to have very low bandwidth con- sumptions. We didn’t use much data, be- cause data was expensive. So we still have very low bandwidth consumption. We use the same technology we had back then and connect new types of interfaces to that technology, which taps into the regu- lar poker liquidity. It’s all built in-house, obviously. We have a mobile team that is focusing just on mobile. We have a specific mobile roadmap. Q: You’ve got a separate strategy and team dedicated to the mobile product? KJELL: Yes. We want to get the same uniqueness that we have in the poker product. We want to get some of the com- ponents into the mobile products as well, such as Instant Rewards, for instance. It is another interface, but we want the player to recognize that “I’m playing with my site here, and I feel comfortable playing here. I have the same wallet, I have the same func- tionality, but it’s a different interface.” JAQUES: People talk ecosystem when they talk about poker. That’s a network ecosystem, profitability perspective. But at Amaya, there’s also an ecosystem within the Amaya Group. We want players and our customers, who are the B2B opera- tors, to be able to give the players a feeling of commonality throughout the ecosystem across the products. Like Fredrik says, if we introduce Strobe on our desktop products, we also want Strobe here, because we want the players to feel that same experience. Q: You want the same experience everywhere. JAQUES: Yeah. You want to be able to listen to your music here and on your com- puter. Same idea. We think the same way. KJELL: Oneofourproductswearelaunch- ing right now is the game office. It’s a player management platform where you have one single view of the customer, regardless of which product they’re playing, from which device they are playing. You have all the data on that customer in one single view, with a lot of different tools connected to it. Instead of developing all the different tools ourselves, we looked at the industry and selected the ones that we and some of our customers think are the best products. We have integrated them into the game office. That means that whoever uses our product, they will have the best analytics tool, best affiliation tool, best CRM tool, best market- ing tool, etc. If they don’t want that, we can integrate something else for you. Q: And by going to an open platform, you’re catering to what a lot of operators want, which is being able to plug and play best of breed, but also integrate it into their own back-end systems. KJELL: This is the back-end system, ac- tually. This is the one system that the cus- tomer will need. But what we feel is unique with this is that we don’t lock in any of our customers on specific games, or say you need to work with this provider. We have a standard offering – we have the games, we have the tools, etc. – but should the customer want anything else, we’re open to having that as well. JAQUES: We want it to be a one-stop shop, so they don’t need to look anywhere else. But we’re obviously very understand- ing of how the market looks at things, that no given operator will have just one com- pany’s casino products. They’ll take the best slots from all the different providers. We’re a one-stop shop, but we’re not a one- size-fits-all. We recognize that. Although we have our preferred supplier for, say, payments, or casino, or affiliate products, somebody might prefer something else. We’ve built it in a very flexible way, with flexible APIs, so that we can plug in any third-party things very easily for us, and for any third parties. It’s a well-defined and configured middle layer which makes that integration process very easy, because that can always be a holdup. 30 Can mobile and social save online poker ?