OPTIMA – The continued growth of the serverless solution

Betting solutions provider OPTIMA concluded a successful 2017 by not only agreeing a deal to supply Betfred with its Multi-Channel Gaming Suite platform, but also by being crowned Standalone Platform Provider of the Year at the SBC Awards.   

OPTIMA received the award, which its CEO Jacob Lopez described as “a great accomplishment” in the same month that it also reached a partnership with IGT for the licensing, support, and development of its sports betting platform in all international regions outside of Italy, the United States, and Canada.

Speaking to SBC after the awards, Lopez added: “As a firm, OPTIMA is committed to being a solution provider of choice for an ever increasing number of customers, and our clients overwhelmingly tell us that they are confident they did the right decision in selecting our platform as their main business framework. Giving the best service possible to our clients and staying at the forefront of the gaming technology, is our primary mission, and we look forward to continuing growth in the near future. To be recognised with the SBC Awards for two consecutive years is a powerful evidence of the effectiveness of our products.

“We work hard at OPTIMA to provide the kind of culture that foster excellence, commitment and learning. Our recent awards are great motivation for Optima employees to be more efficient and do their best every day.”

Analysing how the market has evolved for platform providers over the past year, Lopez continued: “This industry is driven by the market factors as any other. Millennial gamers force the market to go online, adopt flexible, multi-channel format, be everywhere they demand personalised service, and they want the choice.

“At Optima, we not only respond immediately and efficiently to our customers’ needs, but we also carefully follow market trends and observe demographic and psycho-graphic shifts of the players in order to recognise early behaviour patterns and create products that will help our clients enrich greatly their portfolio of products and services. New currencies, new technologies, such as data processing tools, AI, VR and others help us create previously unimaginable solutions that will ensure further market shifts and customers’ growth.”  

A key factor to OPTIMA’s progress this year was the group’s progress in integrating its serverless solution to the UK market. Something that was aided when OPTIMA reaffirmed its commitment to servicing independent bookmakers by announcing an extension to its partnership deal with the Bookmakers Technology Consortium (BTC).

Commenting on the growth of serverless solution, Lopez said: “I will let the numbers speak for themselves: 70% of our customers are Serverless now and more will follow. Among our clients, there are operators who have saved costs massively since they migrated, for new setups and also for day to day operation. OPTIMA Retail product is live in renowned bookmakers worldwide, more than 4000 shops counting amongst the operators live with the system: Chisholm Bookmakers, JenningsBet, Corbettsports, Backhouse, David Pluck, Stan James (Megabet), BarOne Racing, BetCafe (Superbet) Romania, Nairabet and many other operators worldwide.”

He concluded: “EPoS is a cash-based application featuring two-phase image capture and translation and full and partial mark-sense. It has a centralized but supporting ‘stand-alone’ architecture featuring real-time centralised alerting. The notable feature of this product is the large range and richness of features of the products offered. The very traditional background to players in betting shops means the market is resistant to change and therefore electronic systems have evolved to emulate traditional manual practices.

“The EPoS system is largely based on Commodity hardware. This means there is no vendor tie-in; the hardware can be sourced either by OPTIMA or directly by the client. That makes it incredibly easy for the customer to adopt it. The core of the system runs on a totally standard PC running Windows 10 with very low specs, making it very cheap to acquire for the bookmakers.”