The gaming industry celebrates the 2018 Gaming & Hospitality Industry Awards

The prestigious Annual Gaming & Hospitality Industry Awards are one of our industries most coveted awards and uniquely free to enter globally and created and judged by the buying constituency. Award recipients are chosen in three categories: Partner, Transformation and Innovation. The fourth award and highest honor, the Platinum Award, encompasses the three categories in addition to other evaluated criteria. Recipients are considered for their product quality, service and performance.

The highest honor, the Platinum Award, was presented to VizExplorer. Founder and CTO Andrew Cardno stated, "We are honored to be recognized by the G&L Board with the Platinum Award for VizExplorer Golden Record solution. The award validates our direction and our dedication to product innovation. With unmatched ability to integrate outside data sources and match it to a single player profile, the Golden Record helps operators understand the total value of their customers across gaming, hotel, retail, spa, golf and more and deliver targeted offers that boost incremental visits and ROI across the property."

2018 Transformation Award

"Big Data" is today's hot topic, but the truth is that casino operators have already had mountains of data for years. The problem is what to do with it all. And the solution may be to use artificial intelligence to sort it all out. By using natural language, machine learning and artificial intelligence, our product dramatically transforms the way operators can use their existing data to make the most-profitable decisions," said Kiran Brahmandam, CEO of Gaming Analytics Inc. "Our 'insight and recommendation engines' enable users to focus on real-world problems like 'what to do next,' 'which guest segments are at risk,' or 'how should I budget for growth?'" Operators can pose simple, Google-like queries to get answers on how to better service the guests, driving loyalty, profits and cost savings. So, instead of spending human/financial capital gathering data from various sources or learning complicated report generators, users can ask business questions in natural language and receive context-aware answers and insights. Knowledge is available to users across the enterprise almost instantaneously with simple searches. We are thrilled to receive such a prestigious award from the Gaming & Leisure Board. It validates our mission that we are solving the true problem our industry is facing: what to do with the data we have, and how to use it better to gain the highest levels of profitability," said Kiran Brahmandam.

2018 Innovation Award

"GLI has been developing gaming industry-specific test automation tools over the past four years to provide automated testing solutions as part of our robust testing program," said James Maida, President and CEO of GLI. "Our automation process improves efficiency and decreases test time duration, leading to a faster time-to-market for suppliers. We have successfully integrated this new automated testing process on many platforms with more being integrated. Test automation is proving to be a valuable tool for testing increasingly complex and sophisticated gaming devices with complicated math models and paytables which are developed for many domestic and international markets with numerous configurations. Our automation tools allow our engineers to test more efficiently and faster. As the first gaming laboratory to offer test automation, we are honored to be recognized by the G&L Community for this innovative and noteworthy advancement in game-testing technology."

2018 Partner Award

Tony de Leon, CEO, Playersoft stated, "We are truly honored to receive the Partner Award from Gaming & Leisure. This recognition is most valuable because it is judged by industry executives from the G&L Board. It validates Playersoft's commitment to our customers and understanding their business and technology needs."

"We were honored as always to announce this year's recipients of the annual industry awards," said Jeannie Caruso, CEO of Gaming & Leisure and host of the G&L Roundtable and Annual Industry Awards. "The significance and uniqueness of these awards are their judges. This distinguished panel, encompassing property owners and operators in the gaming and hospitality industry, represent a vast majority of gaming technology and services spend in North America. Our judges define the awards, create the rigorous review process, analyze the entrants and select the recipients. The sound and unbiased methodology employed ensures all companies are evaluated fairly and most importantly by the buying constituency. Even if a company finds they are not an award recipient, there is incredible value in having their company granularly reviewed by nearly their entire client base and potential client base. It is an honor to host our industry awards each year recognizing these well-deserving recipients."

Recipients were honored during the award ceremony at the G&L Roundtable and will be featured in the winter 2018 edition of Gaming & Leisure. Bart Lewin, industry renowned technologist and G&L Award's Facilitator, will be the awards feature editor.

The G&L Roundtable is an exclusive annual conclave of industry thought leaders united to advance the landscape of the gaming and hospitality industry through the collaboration, contributions and connections made by these top industry influencers. The annual G&L Roundtable has evolved into a highly coveted private, peer-to-peer forum for gaming and hospitality CXOs to share knowledge among industry leaders who provide expert insight on key topics relevant to those in attendance while continuing to boast the most gaming CIOs in one private forum in North America. Each year the Roundtable seeks to initiate meaningful change in our industry by the very people who can foster that change.

Gaming & Leisure is an organization dedicated to the betterment and unification of the gaming and hospitality industry in every possible way for more than 17 years. Gaming & Leisure publishes the original and exclusive executive management periodical serving the industry's owners and operators domestically and abroad with best practices to effectively manage their companies among other influential products and offerings to help operators and celebrate the industry business partners who serve them.