Jon Stucky, Head of eGaming Sales and Solutions at JT, explained to Business Life how the company is helping eGaming firms expand globally like never before.
eGaming is one of the world’s fastest growing industries. Its technical aspects, artistic design, communication and innovation often outstrip all other sectors when it comes to technological ingenuity.
Pushing the boundaries once more, the eGaming industry is now expanding quickly across jurisdictions.
Like all industries, we’re faced with key market changes. The industry’s diminishing margins and increase in player acquisition costs have created a critical climate of fast-paced innovation. eGaming companies now seek to share their gaming content across networks and platforms globally. Their plan: to appeal to new regions, new cultures and new customer bases, with their impressive gaming platforms.
Going truly global is a dream that companies and industries rarely achieve. However, if any industry is capable, the eGaming industry certainly is. To achieve this aim, the eGaming sector has unknowingly set telecommunications providers the challenge of providing eGaming with the simplest, yet most effective way to expand its reach.
Previously, legal draftsmen across the world struggled to modernise the law fast enough to keep up with the rate of change in eGaming. But legislation has finally caught up. Changes in licensing requirements across the world now mean eGaming companies may need separate licences from different regulators in each country or jurisdiction they expand into. It goes without saying that dealing with a different service provider in each jurisdiction too would make this journey even more time and resource consuming.
At JT we anticipated this shift – more and more of our eGaming customers were asking us to provide data centre partnerships in other jurisdictions. The solution was clear – we had to provide and facilitate eGaming expansion by creating our own global data centre partnerships with likeminded and trusted partners.
Following the establishment and maturity of global eGaming regulators, the eGaming market is now expanding successfully. The Asian market opened up into the UK and Europe as they crossed the cultural barrier with their content. The US, Europe and UK have since been mirroring this expansion in parts.
Online gaming shifts are also driving market consolidation. We predict that, as larger players in the gaming sectors reach out into new markets, there will be fresh rounds of mergers and acquisitions as existing leaders take over their niche competitors. In this climate of change, eGaming companies will rightly look for the best and easiest solution to help them globalise their offering.
Telecommunication providers need to be ready and position themselves as the solution if they’re serious about the eGaming space.
Industry leaders in telecommunications should open their doors and join this global activity, so that they can take advantage of this shift in the eGaming industry.
At JT, we have already recognised the opportunity to expand into the eGaming sector by offering a full-service capability for operators and platform providers, which has been based on insight from customers around the globe.
If, for example, an eGaming customer is operating in Asia and taking services from another client provider in that area, but also wants to sell their data and services into the European market, JT can be the enabler. By connecting the customer’s platform to the secure JT Cloud, customers don’t need to invest in further new hardware in yet another data centre.
Single-supplier simplicity and centralisation with single-source accountability is key for the eGaming industry at this point. Having multi-jurisdictional capabilities requires setting up hosting and IP-providing capabilities in each location.
Having to liaise with different data centres in each jurisdiction is costly and inefficient. Partnering with a company that has the knowledge in each country, and the capability to seamlessly provide the multi-jurisdictional services, solves these complications and will be increasingly in demand.
For hosting and IP service providers to produce a trusted multi-jurisdictional offering backed by accreditation, reputation and experience will be crucial. By creating data centre partnerships across new jurisdictions with accredited organisations, service providers will be primed to help customers expand their businesses. We’ve seen that telecomms providers have the most reputable and secure experience of doing so.
At JT, we’re already responding to these changes in the marketplace and look forward to working with all innovators across the eGaming industry.
Read in Business Life, page 51
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