The Emerging B2B Market

It seems like everyone is getting into the online gambling B2B space at the moment - it feels like every couple of months another operator brings a white label or a feed to the market. This is a trend which has repeated itself many times before in other industries, and web's unique properties as an integration medium between organizations simply accelerates the process.

Over the next few years the gaming industry is going to polarise into marketing-led organisations which own the customer, and technically-led organizations which own the product. This type of supply chain specialization isn't new to most of us and, excluding a few exceptions that might manage to keep a foot in each camp, we'll all need to choose whether we gather around the data and the platform or the customer and the presentation.

History teaches us that, as this unfolds, the waters will be muddy for a while. When operators analyze their portfolios most will find that they have something which can be leveraged into this new B2B market as well as aspects of their business which they are better underpinning with someone else's product from that same marketplace. Add a conservative view on risk and the relatively low level of efficiency that is a property of any newish market and, for the foreseeable future anyway, most organizations will be keeping hold of capabilities which overlap with (and perhaps even have a poorly defined relationship with) external products integrated into the enterprise.

The trick to making sense of this is in the meantime is going to be clearly defined boundaries. We have many good consumers (we all know how to run a book or some games) and few good producers (not many of us have worked out how to take something highly personalized for us and package it up generically) and B2B operators are going to have to take the lead by clearly setting out the scope of their services, how they can be easily integrated, and - perhaps most importantly - what bookmakers are able to do with those services.

At Sporting Solutions we don't sell feeds or access to databases of sports content - those things are just delivery mechanisms - what we sell is automation, cost effective product expansion, and cost reduction tools. The important distinction here is defining our product relative to it's use in an operators environment. After all - we can hardly claim that we offer more cost effective solutions to the sports gambling industry if, for example, an operator has to take our feed and still keep a large contingent of manual data entry or content management staff busy.