Compudigm bet pays off

By ADAM GIFFORD

The gamble of Wellington firm Compudigm that the casino industry could find valuable ways to use its business intelligence software is paying off.

It has just signed a deal worth more than $1 million to put its seePower software in the Conrad Jupiter and Conrad Treasury Casinos in Queensland. It has also sold seePower licences to the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas.

President and co-founder Andrew Cardno said Compudigm was talking to a United States casino chain about using the software in its sites.

Compudigm originally developed seePower to help the Ministry of Fisheries analyse data, but it is applicable to a range of industries.

During the Sydney Olympics, Telstra used it to determine where it should put mobile cellphone transmitters to avoid overloading.

Compudigm showed the potential of seePower at Melbourne's Crown Casino last year when it was used to identify underperforming slot machines. Mr Cardno said seePower "turns stacks of figures and charts into highly visual maps to show levels of activity taking place, what's working and what's not."

Despite looking relatively simple, using bars coded from blue (cold) to red (hot) to indicate performance, it was actually one of the most sophisticated performance-indicator analysis tools around.

Mark Ogilvie, technical leader of the Queensland project, said Conrad Jupiters wanted to use seePower to analyse activity in all parts of the complex, and how it related.

"They want to look at how the customer interacts with the organisation, and how a change in one part of the business ... affects the customers," Mr Ogilvie said. "The seePower product sits on top of the database and quickly and easily creates pictures anybody can understand."

Though seePower was easy for the end-user, there was a lot of work required linking it in with databases and management tools and understanding the data from multiple sources. The data is put in a Sybase data warehousing system, which is able to turn queries around quickly.

Compudigm is expanding its Wellington staff of 55, and has opened an office in Las Vegas.