Winning in the Casino/Gaming Industry
The Survival Game has Begun
Since early 2020, COVID-19 has caused major damage to the world economy. Due to travel ban around the world, the pandemic has done devastating damage especially to the hospitality industry. In order to keep the business survive, retail, hotels, restaurants have been forced to drastically transform operations. Casinos are emptied in Macau. The “used-to-be” street scene packed with travellers from China and other countries is not seen anymore. Casinos have been ordered by Macau government to close down for 15 days back in February 2020. What’s worse? Casino revenues dropped by over 90% compared to a year ago. A year later, businesses are desperate to return to normal life and reopen to the public—and slowly, that’s beginning to happen.
During this economic slowdown, the survival game has begun and most of these major casinos in Macau that we have been engaging for the past 2 years has accelerated their discussions and plans with us, mainly on how to make use of this great opportunity to invest in revamping technologies and infrastructure to better adapt to the new way of customer interaction. How to enhance customer experience in order to get ahead of their competitors.
The industry was already pushing towards a digital evolution—but COVID-19 has taken going digital from a nice-to-have and made it a need-to-have. Making guests, patrons, and employees feel safe and cared for will be the success for reopened casinos, and technology can be the competitive safety edge.
Winning with Data in Motion
The digital realm has become the new competitive battlefield in the global economy. In order to compete and win in today’s world, organizations must continually innovate on software systems that are increasingly critical to how they do business.
This is a matter of life or death for every organization. Customer expectations have been set by tech upstarts that have built on modern platforms and are racing to get to scale. To fend off these disruptors, businesses in every industry are scrambling to rebuild their businesses on a modern software platform.?
This isn’t just a matter of automation, it’s an end-to-end reimagining of business. It means creating rich digital front-end customer experiences and transitioning to sophisticated real-time software-driven backend operations. This is the difference between checking in at the hotel front desk by hotel staff, obtaining the physical access card to your room and making your way to the room versus scanning a QR code with your mobile app for contactless check-in at a kiosk, connecting to the hotel Wi-Fi, go directly to your room and the door automatically opened for your when you are 2 meters away.
In this world, software is no longer simply a set of applications to increase employee productivity (i.e. email, expense reporting). Instead, software is directly orchestrating the customer experiences and operations that run the business. It isn’t just that organizations are using more software, it is that, in a very real sense, they are becoming software-defined.
By their nature, the front-end customer experiences and backend operations of a company are activities that happen continuously and in real-time. However, the current paradigm for data infrastructure doesn’t support a continuous real-time flow of data. Business is real-time but our data isn’t.
Data in motion flips the traditional “database-first” design 180 degrees. Rather than bringing queries to data-at-rest, the required platform needs to be? architected to stream data continuously, and enable continual stream processing “queries” that react to this flow of data as it is generated. These capabilities let companies tap into streams of data being generated anywhere in the company and continually process it.
Data in motion is at the center of the next major wave of technology innovation companies are undergoing and the ability to harness it will be a key factor in determining the competitiveness of every company in the economy of the future.
Digital Transformation Journey
The casino business is built on data, and the ones with the most reliable numbers are considered to be the industry-leaders. Data is also playing an increasingly important role in delivering a superior customer experience. More and more industry players are looking to leverage analytics in order to track customer behavior and create personalized offers delivered in real-time when they are most relevant. The data captured allows casinos to accumulate, monitor, and evaluate the customer information to serve them with a superior experience. The operators use the information collected to provide a personalized gaming experience to the audience in a distinct manner. Keeping players happy, so they will keep coming back, is top priority for casinos.
What the casino industry has really pioneered is data modeling and predictive analytics, as an extreme form of CRM. It doesn’t just end with getting visitors to put the geo-fenced casino app on their phone—a tactic you can leverage to send them a text message or push notification with a special offer. It also means you can find out more about their preferences and keep track of their playing history – and send that information to nearby employees so they can offer the best customer service.
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Like most of the enterprises, the backend of casino operations consists of various data sources and formats coming from Core Gaming, Retail Management, Hospitality Management, Food and Beverage, Ticketing, Location Tracking, CRM, Reward, Offer systems, mobile applications and so on. A lot of these systems are sitting on legacy systems such as mainframes and traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS). Data movements have been powered by traditional messaging or queuing technologies as well as API management solutions. These technologies are great for data transfer from Point A to Point B, however they are not designed to transfer data with high throughput and low latency, scalability is very limited. Not able to support real time event streaming due to lack of data persistence. Thus all data operations are running in batch by design. If you would like to understand more about different positioning of middleware and modern Event Streaming technology such as Apache Kafka, here is a recommended blog.
To get on the digital transformation journey, some of the major players in the casino industry have been adopting Confluent to modernize their infrastructure to support Event Streaming initiatives. It is Apache Kafka at the heart of Confluent, not only providing Publish and Subscribe (Pub/Sub) capabilities, where the key ingredients are streaming data persistence and being able to support Stream Processing by transforming data in real time data streams. Over 80% of Fortune 100 companies across industries such as LinkedIn, Netflix, Tencent, Citi, Audi have been using Apache Kafka to be able to react to business events in real time.
Here we list out 3 key components that power new customer experience. Each of these components drives new use cases and requirements that would require Event Streaming as the central nervous system to support these initiatives.
Establish Real-Time Data Pipelines
To illustrate the idea, with a simplified scenario as shown in the below diagram , Casinos are gradually replacing traditional messaging technologies with Confluent.? To gain insights to support Customer 360 View, real time changes and updates from multiple source databases need be ingested through Change Data Capture (CDC). To implement CDC for common enterprise RDBMS such as Oracle, Confluent has recently released the Oracle CDC Source Premium Connector which has been highly demanded from enterprise customers. See Confluent Blog for more details about this connector.
Once established streaming pipelines, data is persisted in Kafka and continuously being processed with stream processing where casinos leverage ksqlDB or Kafka Streams. Confluent offers ksqlDB to simply stream processing by running KSQL queries which does not require Java development. This opens up to more resources who can contribute to the stream processing application development. With ksqlDB, raw data coming from various sources can be transformed in real time. Users can perform aggregation, enrichment, anomaly detection. Resulting processed data is now persisted in different data topics where downstream applications such as a microservices application generate notifications through SMS or emails to alert users. This is how casinos are responding to business events in real time. To learn more about ksqlDB, there is a great blog to start with, How Real-Time Stream Processing Works with ksqlDB, Animated.
With above transformed data, it can be further pipe into other data stores such as NoSQL databases or Big Data systems for further consumption or processing such as data analytics or Machine Learning workloads. There is an easy way to connect to downstream systems using Kafka Connect. Confluent offers 140+ pre-built connectors with enterprise support. Visit Confluent Hub to see the full list of connectors.
Summary
Why would these key players in the casino industry choose to deploy Confluent? Most of them started out with an open source approach. Gradually realized that Confluent not only offers production safe Kafka platform, Confluent also demonstrates thought leadership defining the future of Apache Kafka. As the maturity of event streaming usages become more business critical, casinos have recognized Data in Motion is giving them competitive advantages in order to win the game!
Any thoughts and comments are welcomed.
References
Business Development Manager | PayCly Merchant Services. | Payment Solutions Expert |
1 年Thanks for sharing