Ahead of the highly-anticipated Prague Gaming & TECH Summit, organizer HIPTHER is thrilled to introduce and put the spotlight on the companies and people that help make the magic happen: our conference sponsors! These innovative, accomplished professionals and teams make magic happen everyday, and they will be joining us at the Prague Gaming & TECH Summit 2024 taking place on 26-27 March, to share insights, network and collaborate with you! Get to know them, connect, and meet them in Prague!

In this Sponsors Spotlight Interview, the #hipthers meet Artur Ashyrov, Chief Technology Officer at GR8 Tech, Main Stage Sponsor of the upcoming Prague Gaming & TECH Summit. Artur will be speaking at the Summit, offering an insightful exploration into the world of cutting-edge technology development.

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EG: Hello Artur, thank you for taking the time for this interview. We are delighted to get to know you and introduce you to our readers! Speaking of introductions, let’s kick things off by hearing more about you and your role as a CTO at GR8 Tech.

AA: Thank you for having me! I’m thrilled to share insights into my journey and the impactful work we do at GR8 Tech. As the CTO, I focus on achieving revenue-driven company goals and developing our engineering team.

My overall journey in tech started in 2006, and since then, I’ve navigated through various sectors, from outsourcing projects to spearheading platform development in industries such as booking systems, CRM, media, iGaming, and more. I love solving complex challenges, driving meaningful tech advancement, and improving large, unwieldy projects to deliver great results, even if it goes along with challenging the status quo in technology, company culture, and mindsets.

At GR8 Tech, I’m also deeply involved in the GR8 Tech Academy, mentoring the next generation of tech professionals. This project, aimed at people entering IT and ensuring they have not just theory but hands-on experience, is very close to my heart. Many of the Academy’s graduates join our team and work to push the boundaries of what’s possible, using technology as a catalyst for growth and transformation.

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EG: GR8 Tech’s “About” section on LinkedIn begins with the intro “GR8 Tech is an international iGaming solutions provider”. Breaking this description down, what are the solutions and products that GR8 Tech offers to clients?

AA: We create a full kit of iGaming products necessary to launch and run a long-term successful, profitable iGaming operation. The front and center of our product lineup is, of course, the high-performance GR8 Sportsbook platform, designed to handle high loads with ease and bring tangible financial results to the operators through unique margin management capabilities. The Sportsbook is complemented by many other products, from the Casino platform to the CRM system, payment gateway, iFrame, etc.

EG: So, GR8 Tech boasts a 360° suite for the iGaming industry, including a payment gateway and CRM system, as well as over 15 successful cases worldwide in its first year alone! What is the secret behind that vast and fast success? Something tells us it’s all about Tech – how do you make it “GR8”?

AA: Having a great background in technology, we are able to develop products that scale seamlessly but also evolve alongside our clients’ growing needs. Understanding that every business eventually requires increased processing capacity and flexibility, we preemptively integrate SDKs and APIs, and ensure data-sharing capabilities within our products, connecting and integrating it all into a unified, well-functioning ecosystem. It sets us apart from many competitors – and is rooted in our commitment to a data-driven approach, which creates additional value for our clients.

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EG: In this first year of GR8ness in the industry, from your first steps till now, what are the most important milestones the company has conquered and its most significant updates?

AA: We are a young company but an experienced team with the long-standing, well-known tech behind the name. So, the biggest challenges for us were associated with finding our own B2B voice and our unique value proposition and presenting it to the market loud and clear. That’s exactly what we did last year, and I think the recognition our products received with nominations in several respectable industry awards, including the SBC Awards and SiGMA Awards, are our most significant milestones, showcasing the growing recognition of GR8 Tech in the industry. This year, we have already opened the business season exhibiting at ICE London, winning several new clients for GR8 Tech, and shortlisting in SiGMA Eurasia and SiGMA Africa. Quite a start – I’m excited for what comes next!

EG: GR8’s chosen brand language and communications are built around the concept of racing; in the race for innovation in the modern Tech scene – especially in iGaming – which emerging technologies are truly useful, and what’s overhyped?

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AA: We are always looking at all emerging technologies, but we are very careful about implementing them for the sake of being “innovative.” We don’t enter the same race for innovation just to put a proud “AI-powered” sticker somewhere on our website for implementing Chat-GPT prompts in our products.

But we look at all trending technologies and implement them when they bring real value to customers. For example, AI has been in our systems for 4-5 years. Now, we are looking at LLM to enhance customer support and other functions.

It is also always interesting to find some useful applications for blockchain, but in our industry, it is really an overhyped technology because it is being pulled everywhere, just like Chat GPT. The metaverse is also very overhyped, and I don’t think this technology will change user habits dramatically because the convenience of AR/VR devices is still far behind the value of the experience. It will be interesting to see what kind of impetus the new Apple Vision Pro will give to this – it seems to me that this is the first step towards making these devices more convenient and mainstream.

EG: At the Prague Gaming & TECH Summit, you will be speaking about “Engineering Excellence”. Can you give our readers and the Summit’s participants an idea of what exactly constitutes Engineering Excellence in today’s Tech, and the key points you will be analyzing at the Conference?

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AA: To understand engineering excellence, you should first think about what the industry is like nowadays. With technologies like Chat GPT, tech specialists can now super quickly do tasks for which before they were paid thousands – for their knowledge, expertise, and amazing coding. So these new technologies raise an interesting question: What is engineering excellence in the world where a machine can do a lot of ‘monkey jobs’ for you?

It turns out, today, technological excellence is not so much about technology but about the ability to think ahead, to design, to not overcomplicate things where they can be avoided, and so on. The latter is especially important, as it is a pressing issue in the industry, as everyone just loves to invent some problems and then create even more problems when trying to solve them.

Another interesting aspect is what engineering excellence is from the client’s point of view. I think that engineering excellence can be measured in how little you pay attention to your tech – everything just works, and that’s it. Not thinking about the number of cores in your processor or the capacity of RAM is the best indication that everything is just how it should be. But to make it so, developers should think rather broadly, investing in great technology and creating stable, scalable infrastructure that’s capable of providing this level of customer experience.

EG: Thank you for this very interesting and insightful interview, Artur! We look forward to seeing you in person at the Prague Gaming & TECH Summit, and hearing all about Engineering Excellence and the development process in your exclusive one-on-one session.

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