GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 27 - February 2014

VN: In terms of the back office, how quick is this system? Amaya: This is a very quick, responsive system. We’re working a lot with separat- ing layers in our technical architecture. So if you’d compare this to one of the more common systems where they have one big database and all the transaction and all the activity going on the gaming platform will have to communicate with this one database – it leaves a lot of dependencies. And it leaves a lot of latency and response time to it. What we’ve done is we’ve broken that up and we work with a very modular system. Each individual part of the system, wheth- er it’s the core which handles the transac- tions or some other post processing sys- tem, does not know what’s going on in the other layers and doesn’t need to know. And because they don’t need to know, we can work on them separately and they can act separately without the dependencies. And we built what we call a canonical information model in between these layers. So that’s where the agreement is between the systems – where they speak the same language. By doing that, they can act independently, but they speak the same language and it makes it very quick and very responsive. VN: It’s one of the concepts behind paral- lel processing. Amaya: Exactly. We can do things asyn- chronously, whereas previously you would have to do them synchronously, which sets up a lot of dependencies. We work with messaging queues. The activi- ties happen. We put them in queues, we let the system handle it. And we can still respond to the player. He can still have his experience in a more independent way. VN: How was the user interface for the back end built? Amaya: We built this on Ruby on Rails technology. And we’re doing that mainly because it’s a very productive coding lan- guage. We have a fairly small team con- sidering the product we’re developing and we roll out a lot of features with a smaller development team (using Ruby on Rails). VN: Did you use any other third-party technology? Amaya: As part of our whole strategy with the Game Office, we’re reusing a lot of third-party content and open-source content. It’s the best-of-breed strategy; we are very competent in our technology working with transactions, but we also know there are experts out there and in a lot of areas and we should use them. By doing that we can be at the forefront of ev- ery part, not just one part. An example of that is using the Twitter Bootstrap for the user interface. And be- cause of that, we can use all of their func- tionality and plug-ins. One example of that is being able to use in-line editing (as part of the user interface). By using the Bootstrap plug-in, you can do this in two or three lines of code. We’re trying to offer the administrator a clear view of what they’re doing with a clear interface, easy access to information and an easier work flow. VN: Does the modular nature of your technology help you from a compliance standpoint? Amaya: We were able to adapt and meet all the requirements from the New Jersey regulators in a very small amount of time, and that’s basically creditable to having technology we could move quickly with. You wouldn’t see that in many other sys- tems. We work in one code base with a small team and a lot of configuration. VN: Basically, the goal is to have one code base that’s modular and nimble. So when you go from state to state or country to country, you can make the necessary com- pliance changes quickly. Amaya: We have a nimble team that al- ways knows what’s happening in the sys- tem. They don’t have to look at different systems, different versions. It’s all there and concentrated. VN: And because the system is built with modular pieces, if something needs to be changed, you can swap out a module with- out having to redevelop the entire system. Amaya: Exactly. And we’re very excited about it. Because one and a half years ago, thiswas a theory. Andnowwe’re proving it. VN: When you were putting this system together, what were the key require- ments that you were hearing from opera- tors that helped shape what the system looks like now? Amaya: The main requirement, I think, if you have to single out one thing, is the ability for operators to get a holistic view of their customer, which means that they have to collect the information available about the customer from all the different activities within the offering. And we’re doing that by standardizing our inter- faces in a way that we know what infor- mation we get from each product vertical. So from the casino, from poker or from sportsbook or bingo, I would get all the information that I need to bring down into one warehouse where I can slice and dice the information. Previously you would look and have may- be three different back offices, one per product, and you would have maybe a da- tabase for each one of them – that’s where you would have to go to search for the ac- tivities of a particular player. Now that I have all that information in one place and I can slice and dice it, I can look at it from different vantages; I can understand why a player is playing this particular game on this particular day in this part of the year, or better understand what types of pro- motions he’s been using. So I’d say that’s one of the top requirements. VN: So basically they wanted one place where they could look at the totality of the player, and slice and dice that data any- way they need to figure out what’s going on with the player. Amaya: That’s the top requirement, and I’d say in second place, you would have the ability to adapt to regulations. We’ve been seeing it for several years now; as bigger markets open up, it’s become more important. If you were looking at a small European jurisdiction, the market size might not be strong enough to drive that type of interest from a lot of operators, but now we’re seeing the way the U.S. is opening up and you need to have the pos- sibility to adapt to that market. So that’s another strong requirement and we’ve talked about that, how we solve that from our modular perspective. “We were able to adapt and meet all the requirements from the New Jersey regulators in a very small amount of time, and that’s basically creditable to having technology we could move quickly with.” 62 Creating a better back office