Earlier this year, Sri Jawaharlal was appointed IGT Chief Technology Officer Global Lottery, reporting to IGT Global Lottery CEO Fabio Cairoli. Across more than two decades of experience with IGT’s Information Technology and Services team, Jawaharlal has been focused on the challenges facing both traditional lottery and iLottery operators.
You’re leading IGT lottery technology at a time of major industry transformation. How are you approaching it?
IGT recognizes that lotteries need flexibility, interoperability, and full support in the ever-blending landscape between retail and digital lottery player needs. I’m focused on improving efficiencies and go-to-market strategies so that we are delivering the best possible solutions to customers in the timeframes they need and expect, enabling them to connect the dots between traditional lottery and iLottery with cloud technology to fully realize the transformative advantages.
Most recently, you oversaw the launch of the industry’s first eInstant cloud in the U.S. How is IGT deploying cloud technology for lotteries?
Wherever we anticipate a dynamic demand, where the volume of activity cannot be controlled, that is a priority for cloud and the best place to start. For example, on a jackpot night, suddenly a large volume of players wants to buy tickets or check their numbers. Our approach has been to migrate all the internet-facing applications to the cloud first, and in that respect IGT is cloud-ready today. All our iLottery products and any retail services accessible over the internet are cloud-enabled.
The second wave, now in process, is to migrate the non-internet-facing applications, including the central systems. Rather than just put our existing applications on the cloud (known as a “Lift & Shift” approach), we are enabling or building them specifically for the cloud to provide customers with more of the benefits.
What do you consider the main benefits of cloud for lotteries?
Security, dynamic scalability, and rapid upgradability are the fundamental reasons for customers to move to a public cloud infrastructure. Let’s take the first wave of applications: Several of IGT’s U.S. customers already have eInstants live in the cloud, and internet sales are growing so fast that this gives them dynamic scalability. Trying to build infrastructure to keep up with the demand would be like building a two-lane road and then trying to convert it into a four-lane road when the traffic surges at Thanksgiving. Then, how do you know what the traffic volume will be at other times? A lottery’s sales volume could grow by 30% or 40% every year. For example, in FY22, year-over-year sales growth for the Georgia Lottery Corporation’s (GLC) “Diggi Games” eInstants category was 49.4%. The GLC received the new upgrade of IGT’s iLottery platform last summer, which included a Remote Gaming Server (RGS) cloud solution.
Also, consider that infrastructure upgrades are up-to-date in the cloud. For instance, for eInstant customers with cloud, there’s no point where you need to do a major system conversion for end-of-life infrastructure, because you are always current. eInstants sales are in growth mode. IGT has the platform that’s fulfilling their expectations and giving them significant ability to grow and scale.
How does cloud tie in to IGT’s vision of omnichannel?
Everyone recognizes that the paradigm of retail is shifting dramatically. Connected Play is IGT’s term for digitizing the retail experience—establishing the appropriate connections between the player and retail touchpoints to deliver a seamless, player-centric experience regardless of the channel and regardless of the different retail models that are evolving. Connected Play brings new contactless, paperless, and cashless experiences to retail. It allows lottery operators to capture player-behavior data and use it to serve players more personalization and enable better Responsible Gaming measures. IGT’s hybrid cloud strategy enables operators’ omnichannel journey wherever a lottery is on their journey to digital.
How would a lottery implement Connected Play – is it only available to iLottery jurisdictions?
All lotteries can enable Connected Play, whether they sell online or not. At the WLS conference in October, we will introduce lotteries to OMNIA™, IGT’s most advanced solution to transform lottery operations and enable Connected Play. OMNIA™ represents a transformational step in the evolution of lottery systems. Building upon decades of IGT’s development and deployment of proven, high-performance, reliable systems, OMNIA™ encapsulates the full breadth of lessons learned and customer inputs from our support of the world’s leading, most innovative lotteries. We’re excited to share the details and enable customers to experience the benefits.