Enabling Rapid Expansion into the USA as the Gambling Market Expands

Author:  Petra Tovrloza

There are a handful of organisations in i-gaming that have been borne in the USA. The US market green lit in 2018, creating some very genuine business challenges with the opportunity for participants to also win big.

Many of the software and platform providers who hold much of the IP that underpins the brands we all know and love, have grown up in Europe and the UK, where the Hyperscale Cloud, became the technology platform of choice for their product dev and go to market strategy as many of the regulated states in the EU allowed this. For the US market, where operating conditions are different, many companies do not have the in house skills, or the boots on the ground to design, evaluate, and deploy private, managed clouds.

Global markets are governed by regulators that insist that certain elements of the technology stack need to be easily identified, client specific and physically located in approved environments. The USA by and large fits this model which presents the challenge for most companies. If you cannot use public cloud, or don’t want to (that’s a choice and there is plenty of evidence to suggest you shouldn’t) then you will find that you need a number of skills, that might not belong in your core business, and rarely belong in your IT partners standard capabilities stack.

What we know is that our clients want to mimic the way they consume the public cloud, whilst meeting regulatory requirements and keeping a lid on costs. Viadex Rapid Deploy is our service offering that seeks to meet and deliver a consumption model similar to cloud. 

The US market is a land grab. Being the first mover makes an enormous difference. The regulatory environment is new and complex, and because of this somewhat less predictable than most gaming executives and their resource pools would like. A typical scenario is that nothing can happen for weeks, months and sometimes years, and then legislation is passed with little warning and licenses are up for grabs and games need to be up and live in a matter of weeks.

For our client, a gambling company based in Europe with offices in Malta, Sweden, the Philippines, Romania, England and the USA, the reliance on an agile and experienced partner in global technology deployment was both a sudden and critical requirement. Further to the speed required they also faced the challenge around holding inventory in every state in preparation for that state becoming regulated as they had deemed it not to be commercially viable a decision further impacted by trying to understand each states rules and regulations for hosting the applications that the client runs.  

Coupled with resource constraints, the project was then further delayed due to inventory shortages further compounded by lead times for vendor technology (hardware) and the time it takes to identify, negitiate, procure, engineer, and then deploy this technology is just a taste of some of the challenges our gaming clients face.

Viadex is the only real IT and Gaming industry expert that has built our solutions specifically around solving these challenges. As our clients can consume technology from Viadex on an Opex Model, this client was able to standardise their stack, with T-shirt sizes, ensuring we delivered a “cloud” in stock ready to go, which was deployed within an extremely short timeline with the financial burden being taken on by Viadex, and our Vendor partners. The traditional delivery is normally measured months and quarters with all the financial obligations being handed over to the clients. Post deployment we then managed and monitored their infrastructure 24/7, providing remote hands and physical support, as this was their choice over the option of delivering the entire stack back to them as a service.

Solving our client’s needs for a trusted partner with verified commercial, technical and operational experience in their industry, they chose to continue using Viadex as a key part of their supply chain solution by consigning stock to mitigate long lead times in equipment. It comes down to the differentiation we offered as industry specialists, understanding the challenges and the way to resolve them, with speed and agility, delivering what they wanted in the right place and within the timeline – very simply defined by them as a turnkey solution with a single point of contact end to end.  

This journey is one of many we handle on an ongoing basis for our clients.  Our focus is to partner vs. supply and ensure that we deliver to ensure our clients success every time on time.