The unifying theme of NSoft, ever since we started nine years ago, is our goal driven investment in innovation and people. We are pleased to report that 2016 was the best year in the NSoft history. In essence it captures the improvement of our products, stronger position on international markets, addition of some great new people to the family as well as expansion of our already significant customer base.
How it all started?
The story of NSoft started in 2008 out of the need and desire for own business. No one could have dreamed that it would be of this magnitude.
Development of the betting software began sporadically since the betting shops in Mostar, NSoft’s HQ, had quite substantial software requests. Due to the increase of the work, 10-15 new employees were employed. As the expenses were higher than ever and the company was dependant on one customer, who terminated the cooperation, NSoft experienced crisis period. That was the turning point when everybody worked harder, learned almost everything about betting industry and the market. Just half a year later, NSoft had 11 customers in the region.
Welcome Sportradar
After gaining first financial benefits and a bit of courage, NSoft decided to visit ICE Totally Gaming in London and managed to draw enough attention from the customers outside of the Balkan region, which encouraged us to visit other exhibitions. Ever since, we are regular exhibitors at majority of important industry expos all over the world.
During one of the exhibitions, we were approached by Sportradar, one of the biggest players in the industry. After a year long negotiations Sportradar became co-owner of NSoft with 40% shares.
So, here we are today, doing business on three continents and employing almost 200 people. Partnership with Sportradar means our products are available through Betradar’s sales channels, Sportradar’s brand.
Lucky Six – the most popular product
In the very beginnings of software development, a breakthrough product was necessary in order to achieve a major success. Nevertheless, a clear vision of what should it be was still out of reach. After a few brainstorming sessions, simple but unclear idea emerged, in an essence simple, but hiding a complicated task behind. Everybody knew that something good was to be born out of the initial blurry vision, so they gathered and started making a game. That was the very beginning of Lucky Six, and as time will tell, the milestone and a foundation of what NSoft is today.
The concept of the game (number of balls, colours, drawing sequence) is the same from the first version. Nowadays, the design is clean, elegant and user-friendly. Full responsiveness, full HD, full modularity, vector based animations, 3D models, excellent optimization, changes of font, drum and colours are just some aspects of Lucky Six.
No rules is the only rule
The continuous growth has brought many young experts to our family of more than 180 employees at this moment. We do believe and cherish the inherent capabilities of everyone, which is why everyone at NSoft is provided with the same opportunities for growth and improvement based solely on objectives and personal aspirations.
Our people have the benefit of our ‘no rules’ approach to the work and are therefore capable to deliver the best of their potential to ensure the growth in quality and performance of our products and consequently create a significant growth in value for our valued partners.
Our true pride are relationships, family-like atmosphere and genuine desire to give employees the taste of company’s success. Considering that we offer a family-like working environment, we managed to expand our business and become one of the leading employers in the area. It is our honour to hear that professionals want to become NSofters and be part of the family.
Everything is based on the development of the powerful SEVEN Platform
Our SEVEN Platform was launched in 2016 and recognized as an important tool in turnkey management of betting and gaming operations. I am very proud of all the effort and time that has been put into development of such a product. SEVEN finally incorporates all of our ideas and efforts into a single solution.
When I (Mario Krišto, NSoft’s Managing Director for Platform) was given a task to architect and lead the project of developing a large scale gaming platform from scratch, I said to myself, “Well this could be fun”, but I had no idea how much. The functional and nonfunctional requirements were high, as we were to create a single cloud based solution that would be able to offer all the tools for betting products to make them available on all major distribution channels – from retail, terminal to web and mobile and offer betting operators all the tools to manage every segment of their operation; from locations, terminals, users, payments, settings, reports, etc.
To develop a platform, you definitely need more then few things available to you. The first major one is domain knowledge and experience. You absolutely need this as it will provide the development team the necessary knowledge to grasp the specific gargon, the key betting concepts and provide them insight into a betting operators mind. Luckily for us, we had plenty of domain knowledge.
Another major component into the mix is a good and technically able team with the willpower and knowledge to tackle some of the hardest technical challenges you can encounter in the industry. We’ve set ourselves ambitious goals of scaling to millions of transactions a day, millions of users operating under different operators.
Motivation for the team and management satisfaction is also one of the biggest issue you’re facing as the team is developing abstract goods without major visibility of the things they develop. Imagine 500k of lines of code and nothing to really show to your bosses except these lines of code so management has to be patient and have trust in the technical leadership for a project of this scale to succeed.
When you get to the bottom of the things which matter most in a platform software is fundamental understanding of the “things” you’re building the platform for and to identify what are the key components to have and offer them through a set of well documented and tested APIs. Defining those API contracts is not easy as they have to be as generic as possible but concrete enough to be useful. You would need a way to abstract the needs of a Slots like game, Sportsbook, Virtual Games, Lotteries, Casino and such and provide all that is needed for them to seamlessly function inside the eyes of the player and operator alike.
For a betting platform, among other important things, I would say that user accounts and their transactions are the most important. Having a well defined Wallet API which offers seamless interaction with multiple product providers which consequently allow a user to have a single balance from which he places bets without transferring money around is the key for both integration of these products into the platform and for the user’s UX. Having this single source of all transactions offers great benefits for operators as well as we’re able to offer real-time reporting and insight into the operations through our well structured pre-aggregated reports for easy and fast access any time.
Bright present and even brighter future
The betting market is global. It is characterized by very tight lead times from concept to a finished product. Our expansion has been rapid and brought us partners and friends, instead of just customers.
Our finances have grown as well. 2016 was a year where NSoft had gained international recognition for our work – we claimed the 5th place on Deloitte’s Fast 50 list of the fastest growing technology companies in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as, 55th place on Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ EMEA as the only representative from Bosnia and Herzegovina ever.
Today, NSoft is a stable, well-positioned company with employees that share family bonds and our philosophy. This philosophy holds true for each and every one of us, irrespective of the different types of work we do within the company.
Meet us at ICE 2017
All our virtual games, sports betting solutions, integrated casino games and other third party solutions exist as units and services within the SEVEN Platform. SportsBook has seen many improvements, polishing and new features. Besides already implemented Betradar’s MTS (Managed Trading Services) that allows customers to externalise their operational risk and liability management completely to Betradar’s proven industry expertise and competence, we are introducing SportsBook Self-Managed. It is fully integrated into SEVEN Platform through all delivery channels (web, mobile, terminal, retail) and gives the customer full autonomy of sports events creation, odds management and risk management.
We are also very proud to become one of the few Betradar Gold Certified Partners. This confirms that NSoft is qualified to provide professional services that are designed to assist customers in rapidly deploying and implementing Betradar’s Pre-Match Betting, Live Betting, Live Channel, Managed Trading Services and Gaming Solutions. In addition, NSoft is qualified to assist in rapidly deploying and implementing Betradar’s entire portfolio of Gaming Solutions with just one integration via Betradar’s Remote Game Server.
We were also quite busy in virtual games development. Besides standard improvements, we have two new race games – Drag Races and Motorcycle Speedway. Both are extremely fast-paced and provide a lot of excitement, betting options and amazing graphics. These games definite enrichment to betting operator’s portfolio and will definitely help them boost their revenues.
With our investments into automation, effective organization, strong customer focus and skilled, dedicated employees, we are hoping to bring you a step closer to becoming a member of the NSoft family. NSofters will be exhibiting its products at ICE, stand S1-140.