Australia
Exclusive Q & A with Marc Edwards, CEO of ORDER
Q. Congratulations on joining ORDER as the new CEO! What are your early reactions to the job?
A. It is an exciting time to join the organisation. I had been working for ORDER in a consultancy capacity for 6 months prior to joining as CEO, so the transition has been relatively seamless. My early impressions are full of opportunity and growth. The industry is forging ahead and receiving a lot of attention from mainstream media and non-endemic brands looking to be involved in the space, and with ORDER being a first mover in esports and now 4 years later is well established, we are looking forward to this next stage of our evolution.
Q. Do you find heading an Esports team much different than leading an organization in traditional sports or motor sports, where you had spent most of your career?
A. There are a lot of similarities with the support structure of esports and traditional sports, especially when it comes to fostering a culture of high performance and professionalism. And now as we look ahead, player welfare and grass roots programs are firmly on the agenda to ensure we are both looking after our professional players, but also playing a role as a leader in the industry to provide pathways for the next generation of talent. If we look at the commercial side of the industry there are certainly some parallels to draw with sponsorship, brand activations and fan engagement and how these are delivered to offer the best value to brands. The real difference in this area of the business is the ability to innovate and execute on new ideas without the constraint of governing or league bodies. Further, we also see the customer facing area of our business as a far more creative than traditional sports – more along the lines of a music label. Essentially our talent, who are professional gamers and content creators, are at the core and the support crew we build around them to bring this to life are creatives, e.g. content managers, creative directors, digital marketers and brand builders.
Q. For the outside world, Australia, where ORDER is based, is known for its outdoor sports. How is esports catching up in the country? How does its popularity compare with that of traditional sports?
A. Traditional sports are fed by generations of participation and ultimately viewership. Right now the esports industry in Australia is no more than 5 years old, yet despite the lack of history and level of unfamiliarity the fan base has more than doubled in the past 2 years alone. With the majority of esports fans being in the 18 to 34 age bracket and skewing male, there has been a natural migration of fans from traditional sport into esports, which is a sign of how Australia’s deep passion for sport is changing. Esports provides this generation an alternative outlet for entertainment and it’s being supported big time. While the current audience base skews male there is a ground swell of engagement coming from the female audience and is being driven by women gamers increasingly turning professional.
Q. ORDER has recently raised a $5.3 million funding? What are the immediate plans to drive the growth?
A. We will solidify our position in Oceania esports while continuing to look at opportunities in other esports titles. The real growth for ORDER though will be in content creation and production and building an audience around our brand. To do that we are looking for content creators across multiple platforms and gaming influencers who will become part of the ORDER crew and benefit from our administrative support and enabled to continue to grow their current activities. Also, in a first for an esports organisation the region, earlier this year ORDER took residency at our new facility in Collingwood Melbourne, which will feature the Alienware esports high performance room, Logitech streaming room, production studio and administrative offices.
Q. Could you talk about the new diversification initiatives that are in pipeline?
A. Outside of what I have mentioned above, ORDER will continue to evolve our gaming production capabilities, with a bespoke offering across events and licensed content. We are also looking towards collaborations with creatives and artists across music, fashion, and art. We see gaming as aligning strongly with the future of pop culture and these pursuits have paved the way for gaming to move from a subculture to pop culture in its own right.
Q. It appears that the lock down forced by the Covid 19 pandemic has turned out to be a turning point for esports in general. How did it affect the growth of ORDER?
A. For ORDER, and most esports organisations, the events of the last year or so have put greater emphasis on the need for online event capability, content production and building a mass audience. While much of this growth is still in it’s infancy, the realignment of strategy in the early stage of 2020 provided us a long enough runway to start executing and importantly secure significant funding to accelerate our growth ambitions.
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Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, announced that PointsBet, one of Australia’s fastest-growing digital wagering operators, has selected Grafana Cloud as its unified observability platform. PointsBet is using Grafana Cloud to consolidate telemetry across its proprietary betting platform, accelerate incident resolution with AI-powered insights and give engineering teams the visibility they need to own and operate their services with confidence.
“Our platform is our product. Grafana Cloud gives us one place to see everything — and the AI tools to act on it fast,” Daniel Lucas, CTO at PointsBet.
Grafana Cloud was selected for its ability to deliver:
• Unified Observability Across Every Data Source: PointsBet’s proprietary platform spans real-time odds calculation, player account management, front-end apps and a custom-built betting engine, all generating high-volume telemetry from multiple sources. With Grafana Cloud, PointsBet can ingest and correlate metrics, logs, traces and profiles in a single open platform, ending the fragmentation that slows incident response. Built on OpenTelemetry and open source foundations including Grafana Loki, Grafana Tempo and Prometheus, there’s no vendor lock-in — just a unified view of the stack. This flexibility is what enables PointsBet’s shift towards a true service ownership model: engineering teams can now observe, understand and act on what they build.
• AI That’s Actually Useful: Grafana Assistant gives PointsBet engineers a context-aware AI co-pilot for investigation and troubleshooting, letting them query telemetry in natural language, navigate dashboards and trace issues to root cause without deep expertise in PromQL, LogQL or TraceQL. Now generally available in Grafana Cloud, Grafana Assistant can run multi-step incident investigations, generate and refine queries on the fly, and surface the right data at the right moment — keeping every action inside the tools teams already use. For a business where live betting windows close in seconds, reducing time-to-resolution isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a competitive edge.
• Application Observability That Empowers Developers: Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides PointsBet’s teams with end-to-end visibility into how their services perform — surfacing service dependency maps, latency hotspots and the customer impact of every change. By connecting distributed traces, metrics and logs in a unified view, Application Observability helps teams understand not just that something broke, but why and who is affected.
“Observability used to mean drowning in dashboards, alert noise and waiting for someone else to tell you what’s on fire. We chose Grafana Cloud because it brings technology and commercial teams together on the single view building autonomous value streams — and Grafana Assistant means our engineers spend less time asking ‘what’s wrong’ and more time fixing it. It enables the shift from reactive firefighting to teams that genuinely own their services end to end and that helps us build a platform our customers can reliably bet on,” said Saurabh Vyas, Head of SRE, PointsBet.
“Real-time platforms at scale are some of the hardest systems to operate — every component has to perform under pressure, and every signal matters when something goes wrong. PointsBet’s engineering team has built a sophisticated platform, and we’re proud to give their engineers the observability foundation they need to operate it. Open, AI-powered, and built to cut through complexity — that’s exactly what Grafana Cloud is for,” said Anthony Woods, co-founder of Grafana Labs.
The post PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Australia
Elections, Bitcoin, and the Australian Open: Slotegrator breaks down prediction markets in new ebook
Annual trading volume in the prediction market vertical grew from $500 million to $64 billion in only three years. What’s behind their explosive popularity? In a new ebook, Slotegrator lays out why this latest evolution in betting has so much appeal for players and what operators need to consider before launching their own prediction market.
Why have prediction markets captured so much attention? In a new downloadable ebook, Slotegrator lays out the factors behind the vertical’s popularity, analyzes how prediction markets are disrupting the modern betting landscape, and provides a checklist to help readers decide if
the time is right for them to add a prediction market to their platform.
In the ebook, Slotegrator highlights generational shifts in preferences and behavior, such as the increase in younger players who are familiar with trading and financial markets, as one of the main drivers in the rise of the format. There’s also a widespread change in values; players view the P2P exchange mechanic, in particular, as a more transparent form of betting than wagering against the house.
“Today, the audience’s attention shifts in real time across platforms, and digital experiences evolve constantly. If you’re not actively tracking where engagement is moving, you’re not just behind the trend — you’re already losing relevance in the market,” comments Olga Ivanchik, COO of Slotegrator.
Opinion-based betting allows users to trade literally any event from politics to current events. The pursuit of getting a more interactive, dynamic, and fair experience is reflected in prediction market mechanics: the odds in this type of betting are not set by the house but fluctuate in accordance with supply and demand — players bet against each other, and the platform generates revenue on commissions based on the amount of bets.
“This transition eliminates the old conflict of interest and gives us a more transparent, equitable, and stimulating experience where value is defined by the market itself”, says Maksym Shtun, Product Owner at Slotegrator.
The report provides analytics with key figures, regulatory notes, expert comments, and an explanation of the mechanics involve. It also includes useful tips for readers:
- A checklist that will help operators understand whether they need prediction markets on
their platform - Tips and recommendations on the events for betting by region
- Comparison of prediction market mechanics with classic sportsbooks
- Analysis of relevant psychological factors
- Breakdown of how exactly how prediction markets generate revenue
Download the guide and get a full understanding of the prediction market phenomenon. Be among the first operators to make the most of the quickest growing opportunity in iGaming.
ABOUT THE COMPANY
Since 2012, Slotegrator has been one of the iGaming industry’s leading software and business solution providers for online casino and sportsbook operators.
The company’s main focus is software development and support for online casino platforms, as well as the integration of game content and payment systems.
The company works with licensed game developers and offers a vast portfolio of casino content: slots, live casino games, poker, virtual sports, table games, lotteries, casual games, and data feeds for betting.
Slotegrator also provides consulting services in gambling license acquisition and business incorporation.
The post Elections, Bitcoin, and the Australian Open: Slotegrator breaks down prediction markets in new ebook appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Australia
Elections, Bitcoin, and the Australian Open: Slotegrator breaks down prediction markets in new ebook
Annual trading volume in the prediction market vertical grew from $500 million to $64 billion in only three years. What’s behind their explosive popularity? In a new ebook, Slotegrator lays out why this latest evolution in betting has so much appeal for players and what operators need to consider before launching their own prediction market.
Why have prediction markets captured so much attention? In a new downloadable ebook, Slotegrator lays out the factors behind the vertical’s popularity, analyzes how prediction markets are disrupting the modern betting landscape, and provides a checklist to help readers decide if
the time is right for them to add a prediction market to their platform.
In the ebook, Slotegrator highlights generational shifts in preferences and behavior, such as the increase in younger players who are familiar with trading and financial markets, as one of the main drivers in the rise of the format. There’s also a widespread change in values; players view the P2P exchange mechanic, in particular, as a more transparent form of betting than wagering against the house.
“Today, the audience’s attention shifts in real time across platforms, and digital experiences evolve constantly. If you’re not actively tracking where engagement is moving, you’re not just behind the trend — you’re already losing relevance in the market,” comments Olga Ivanchik, COO of Slotegrator.
Opinion-based betting allows users to trade literally any event from politics to current events. The pursuit of getting a more interactive, dynamic, and fair experience is reflected in prediction market mechanics: the odds in this type of betting are not set by the house but fluctuate in accordance with supply and demand — players bet against each other, and the platform generates revenue on commissions based on the amount of bets.
“This transition eliminates the old conflict of interest and gives us a more transparent, equitable, and stimulating experience where value is defined by the market itself”, says Maksym Shtun, Product Owner at Slotegrator.
The report provides analytics with key figures, regulatory notes, expert comments, and an explanation of the mechanics involve. It also includes useful tips for readers:
- A checklist that will help operators understand whether they need prediction markets on
their platform - Tips and recommendations on the events for betting by region
- Comparison of prediction market mechanics with classic sportsbooks
- Analysis of relevant psychological factors
- Breakdown of how exactly how prediction markets generate revenue
Download the guide and get a full understanding of the prediction market phenomenon. Be among the first operators to make the most of the quickest growing opportunity in iGaming.
ABOUT THE COMPANY
Since 2012, Slotegrator has been one of the iGaming industry’s leading software and business solution providers for online casino and sportsbook operators.
The company’s main focus is software development and support for online casino platforms, as well as the integration of game content and payment systems.
The company works with licensed game developers and offers a vast portfolio of casino content: slots, live casino games, poker, virtual sports, table games, lotteries, casual games, and data feeds for betting.
Slotegrator also provides consulting services in gambling license acquisition and business incorporation.
The post Elections, Bitcoin, and the Australian Open: Slotegrator breaks down prediction markets in new ebook appeared first on Americas iGaming & Sports Betting News.
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