One of the more remarkable turnarounds in recent American culture has been the embrace of sports betting and online gaming. What was once considered a vice and relegated to relatively few in-person jurisdictions has quickly exploded into the mainstream and online.
Like with any growth industry, this has had cascading consequences for others that work in the sector. This includes technology providers and partners that have had to rush to address the many challenges of such meteoric growth within a highly regulated industry.
Chariot Solutions has been on the front lines of this transition, supporting many well-known brands across the range of emerging new business models. As we look ahead, our work in five key areas helps define other potential applications of technology in this space.
iCasinos
When you hear the term casino, most people think of a brick-and-mortar building with thousands of square feet occupied by noisy slot machines and packed gaming tables. But as with most industries, digitization has come for the in-person world. For gaming, that means the rise of iCasinos or digital-first gaming experiences.
These iCasinos require new tools and solutions that balance user experience with back-end operations and regulatory requirements. Customers want a look and feel reminiscent of a traditional casino gaming experience but with all the advantages and conveniences of the digital world.
Our work has included the launch of new iCasinos for iOS, creating data feed integrations, and developing tools to test integrations before games can go live on web or mobile platforms. Given the relative newness of the sector, we’ve also had to build custom solutions to overcome third party integration issues and consolidate configuration mismatches with client systems.
All of this has given us a tremendous amount of experience working with third party industry providers like White Hat Gaming, Kanomi, Evolution, and others.
Sportsbooks
Chances are you’ve seen more than one ad promoting a mobile app that allows you to bet on the outcome of a sporting event. Like with casinos, this is because sportsbooks are moving online and to mobile platforms and are surging in popularity.
As part of this shift, Chariot helped launch the first iteration of iOS and Android apps for two major operators. We cut our teeth in the space developing a management system for configuring sportsbook promotions, messaging, and casino games. We also helped integrate click stream data from newly released mobile apps into an operator’s existing loyalty program. And we even built a multi-stage data pipeline using AWS technologies.
One of the interesting features of the gaming industry is that there are no unified federal gaming policies. Instead, operators manage a complex network of state-by-state licenses and regulations. This means companies must navigate a thicket of dense regulation that changes depending on which states they operate within – an enormous burden on IT teams.
Chariot was recently tasked with taking on the heavy lift of building out new responsible gaming features for a sportsbook operator as part of their regulatory obligations. These are legally required features like the ability to set daily, weekly or monthly dollar limits for how much a user can deposit or wager; activate time limits for how long they can use the account; disable an account for a set term; or for a user to place themselves on a state-run list that prevents them from using an online sportsbook.
In this specific case, we had to meet several tight deadlines while transitioning the features from a web-view to native iOS and Android applications. It was hugely rewarding when Gaming Laboratories International (GLI) called our final product “one of the best and most comprehensive in the industry.”
Kiosks
The rise of online and mobile sportsbooks has been accelerated using multiple overlapping online and real-world points of engagement. Beyond the familiar mobile apps, this includes a recent push to install sports betting kiosks in physical locations like casinos or stadiums.
While this convergence of in-casino, mobile and now on-site betting options makes sense from a business perspective (think Starbucks!), it also creates enormous risk and exposure. Companies must be able to manage a fleet of kiosks remotely while ensuring flawless security and seamless operations.
That means deploying both a physical and network security system while managing frequent firmware and software updates fleet-wide from afar. Add data analysis, reconciliation and compliance reporting into the mix, and IT teams have a big headache on their hands.
Chariot was enlisted as a critical part of a team writing new software to replace Kambi on existing kiosks for a client. We were responsible for writing code to interact with hardware like doors, locks, LEDs, barcode scanners, magnetic stripe reader, and bill validators.
Our team also had to interface with GLI for the certifications of this new code and modified hardware. At the same time, a portion of the team took ownership of the white label kiosk product written in React by a SaaS provider to rebrand the front end for use by our client.
Pro tip for others working on kiosks: have one installed on-site for your own development teams to use and test as part of ensuring a quality user experience.
Retail
Even with the explosion in iCasinos and online sportsbooks, traditional brick-and-mortar casinos continue to thrive. But they also face technology challenges as they optimize for this new hybrid reality. One area of low-hanging fruit is the treasure trove of data retail operators own in their slot machines. In the case of one Chariot client, 120TB of historical data!
Real-time analysis of that data could lead to vastly improved operations. One small example might be a staff intervention to offer a bonus play or free meal to a loyal customer who is having a particularly bad day. A bigger one might be a more detailed understanding of gameplay patterns so teams can adjust the layout of their machines or know when to capitalize on peak hours.
Chariot was tapped by our client to evaluate and then make recommendations for how they could best ingest these vast amounts of raw telemetry data from their machines to make it usable for business analytics. This included a plan for how to best convert that 120TB of inaccessible historical data into a valuable resource for the organization.
As part of our research into this problem, we learned that even those brands that already utilize one of the available data extraction services don’t have the tools on hand to immediately import, clean and analyze that data. This is both an enormous untapped opportunity and a gigantic cost center.
Operators need to attack this in phases – first by extracting historical data, cleaning it, and then creating dashboards and analysis tools to make it usable. The second is to build a real-time pipeline for data so they can make it operational in service to the business.
Infrastructure and Scalability
A fast-growing industry with a steadily expanding user base also demands that IT teams design with scale in mind. Building and managing scalable infrastructure that can handle an influx of bettors while adhering to potentially 50+ shifting regulatory landscapes is no small feat.
Chariot took on this challenge while helping a client relocate its infrastructure from Europe to the United States. We architected and implemented a plan to move all their AWS non-production and production infrastructure in a way that also addressed major latency issues being experienced by their North American customers.
Our multi-regional approach was created to specifically reduce latency, increase reliability, and ensure scalability. As part of that, our team created an app to fetch data from AWS, GCP, Github, Azure, Confluent, Cloudflare, and an assortment of other third party APIs to generate audit reports for all GLI jurisdictions.
In this interview, we talk to Chariot consultant Drew Rogers about some of the nuanced aspects of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Development Operations (DevOps) within the rapidly evolving domain of sports betting.
The Future of Tech for Gaming
Over the course of all Chariot’s recent projects, one clear lesson has emerged: technology is coming for the gaming industry. And with new and bigger changes ahead as the industry continues to evolve, the demands on IT teams will only grow.
Chariot is uniquely able to meet the needs of gaming companies through our proven combination of technology expertise and business know-how. Our teams can augment internal staff, serve as trusted providers, or consult with leadership to recommend optimal future technology strategies.
Contact us today to learn how we can help.