Transcript of a discussion on how a culture of IT innovation is helping to establish a single wholly nationally owned company to operate gaming in Finland.

1. How Veikkaus Digitally Transforms as it Emerges as the
New Combined Finnish National Gaming Company
Transcript of a discussion on how a culture of IT innovation is helping to establish a single
wholly nationally owned company to operate gaming in Finland.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition to the Hewlett Packard Enterprise
(HPE) Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital
transformation. Stay with us now to learn how agile businesses are fending off
disruption in favor of innovation.
Our next case study highlights how combined Finnish national gaming company,
Veikkaus, is managing a complex merger process while also bringing more of a
digital advantage to both its operations and business model. We'll explore how
Veikkaus uses a power big-data analytics platform to respond rapidly to the
challenges of digitization.
So join us, as we learn how a culture of IT innovation is helping to establish a single wholly
nationally-owned company to operate gaming and gambling in Finland. To describe how
Veikkaus is transforming itself for better customer experience from the core to the edge, we're
joined by Harri Räsänen, Information and Communications Technology Architect at Veikkaus in
Helsinki.
Welcome, Harri.
Harri Räsänen: Thank you. It’s nice to be here.
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Gardner: Let’s hear a bit about why Veikkaus has to reinvent or reestablish some core
technology. You have a big undertaking of bringing several different gaming organizations
together and also to provide as good user experience as possible. Tell us your story.
Räsänen: With our data infrastructure development during the last two to three years, we didn’t
have any clues to whether the gaming companies would merge or not.
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Gardner

2. So, we just started the development by our own company. Our data warehouse solution was a
quite traditional data warehouse, and had been around for 10 years. Different things had gone
wrong. One of the key issues we faced was that our data wasn’t real time enough. It was far from
real time -- data that was one or two days old.
We decided that we need to get data quicker and in more detail because we had aggregate data
level and that sort of thing.
Gardner: What were some of your top requirements technically in order to accomplish that?
Real-time data
Räsänen: As I said, we had quite a old-fashioned data warehouse. Initially, we needed our
game-service provider to feed us data more in real time. They needed to build up a mechanism to
complete data, and we needed to build out capabilities to gather it. We needed
to think about the information structure totally from scratch.
Gardner: When we think about gambling, gaming, or lotteries, in many cases,
this is an awful lot of data, a very big undertaking. Maybe you could give us
some sense of the size of the data and the disparity of the three organizations
that came together including the football organization. We want to hear more
about the size and variety of the data.
Räsänen: I'll talk about our current situation records. The new company we are starting up next
year.
We have a big company from a customer point of view. We have 1.8 million consumers. Finland
has a population of 5.5 million. So, we have a quite a lot of Finnish consumers. When it comes to
transactions, we get one to three million transactions per day. So it’s quite large, if you think
about the transactional data.
In addition to that, we gather different kinds of information about our web store; it’s one of the
biggest retail web stores in Finland..
Gardner: It’s one thing to put in a new platform, but it’s
another to then change the culture and the organization and
transform into more of a digital business. How is the
implementation of your new data environment aiding in your cultural shift?
Räsänen: Luckily, Veikkaus has a background of doing things quite analytically. If you think
about web store, there is a culture that we need to be able to monitor what we're doing if we're
running some changes in our web store -- whether it works or not. That’s a good thing.
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Räsänen

3. But, we are redoing our whole data technology. We added the Apache Kafka integration point
and then, Cloudera, the Hadoop system. Then, we added a new ETL tool for us, Pentaho, and last
but not least, HPE Vertica. It's been really challenging for us, with lots of different things to
consider and learn.
Luckily, we've been able to use good external consultants to help us out, but as you said, we can
always make the technology work. In transforming the culture of doing things, we're still
definitely in the middle of our journey.
Gardner: I imagine you'll want to better analyze what takes place within your organization so
it’s not just serving the data and managing the transactions. There's an opportunity to have a
secondary benefit, which is more control of your data. The more insight you have allows you to
adapt and improve your customer experience and customer service. Have you been able to start
down that path of that secondary analysis of what goes on internally?
New level of data
Räsänen: Some of our key data was even out of our hands in our service-provider
environments. We wanted to get all the relevant data with us, and now we've been working on
that new level of data. We have analysts working on that, both IT and business people, browsing
the data. They already have some findings on things that previously they could have asked or
even thought about. So, we have been getting our information up to date.
Gardner: Can you give us more specific examples of how you've been able to benefit from this
new digital environment?
Räsänen: Yeah, consumer communication on CRM is one of the key successes, things we
needed to have in place. We've been able to constantly improve on that. Before, we had data that
was too old, but now, we have near real-time data. We get one-minute-old data, so we can
communicate with the consumers better. We know whether they've been playing their lotteries or
betting on football matches.
We can say, "It’s time for football today, and you haven’t yet placed a bet." We can
communicate, and on the other hand, we can avoid disturbing customers by sending out e-mails
or SMS messages about things they've already done.
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Gardner: Yes, less spam, but more help. It’s important, of course, with any organization like this
in a government environment, for trust and safety to be involved. I should think that there's some
analysis to help keep people from overdoing it and managing the gaming for a positive outcome.
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4. Räsänen: Definitely. That’s one of the key metrics we're measuring with our consumer so that
gaming is responsible. We need to see that all things they do can be thought of as good, because
as you said, we're a national company, it’s a very regulated market, and that kind of thing.
Gardner: But a great deal of good comes from this. I understand that more than a billion euros a
year go to the common good of people living in Finland, and of course, some 2,000 people are
employed at Veikkaus. So, there are a lot of benefits when this is done properly.
Räsänen: You said 2,000 people employees, but that will be after we merge. Currently, we have
something like 350 people. So, it's a quite small company as of today.
Gardner: Now that you've gone quite a ways into this, and you're going to need to be going to
the new form and new organization the first of 2017, what advice would you be able to give to
someone who is beginning a big data consolidation and modernization journey? What lessons
have you learned that you might share?
Out of the box
Räsänen: If you're experimenting, you need to start to think a little bit out of the box.
Integration is one of crucial part, and avoid all direct integration as much as possible.
We're utilizing Apache Kafka as an integration point, and that’s one of the crucial things, because
then you can apify everything. You're going to provide an application interface for integrating
systems and that will help those of us in gaming companies.
Gardner: A lot a services orientation.
Räsänen: That’s one of the components of our data architecture. We have been using our
Cloudera Hadoop system for archiving and we are building our capabilities on top of that. In
addition, of course, we have HPE Vertica. It’s one of our most crucial things in our data
ecosystem because it’s a traditional enterprise data warehousing in that sense it is a SQL
database. Users can take a benefit out of that, and it’s lightning fast. You need to design all the
components and make those work on that role that they are based at.
Gardner: And of course SQL is very commonly understood as the query language. There's no
great change there, but it's really putting it into the hands of more people.
Räsänen: I've been writing or talking in SQL since the beginning of the ’90s, and it’s actually a
pretty easy language to communicate, even between business and IT, because at least, at some
level, it’s self-explanatory. That’s where the communication matters.
Gardner: Just a much better engine under the hood, right?
Räsänen: Yeah, exactly.
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5. Gardner: I am afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been exploring how combined Finnish
State Gaming Company, Veikkaus, is managing a complex merger process, while also bringing
more of a digital advantage to its operations in business. And we've learned how a culture of IT
innovation is helping to establish a single wholly owned state company to operate gaming in
Finland.
Please join me in thanking our guest. We've been here with Harri Räsänen, Information and
Communications Technology Architect at Veikkaus in Helsinki. Thank you Harri.
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Räsänen: Thank you.
Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining us for this Hewlett Packard
Enterprise Voice of the Customer digital transformation discussion.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HPE-sponsored interviews. Thanks again for listening, and please do come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a discussion on how a culture of IT innovation is helping to establish a single
wholly owned state company to operate gaming in Finland. Copyright Interarbor Solutions,
LLC, 2005-2016. All rights reserved.
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