Lotto New Zealand seeks mobile 'anywhere, anytime' gaming

Lotto NZ, the state-owned operator of New Zealand lotteries, is preparing to embark on a rebuild of its systems to offer "anywhere, anytime" smartphone gaming.

It is also seeking to develop a connected experience between its digital and retail channels and a deep understanding of customers through the collection and utilisation of data.

Ideally, Lotto NZ says, it wants to deploy its retail applications from a single code base, to adopt a "mobile centric" philosophy and to reduce system complexity.

"The current web and mobile applications are separate bespoke platform-specific developments," Lotto says in a tender document. "This has resulted in multiple applications and architectures.

"As a result this has increased the cost of change, reduced agility and has fragmented the end user experience while creating a technology support burden."

Lotto says it expects its future environment will comprise of a hybrid mobile app and a single website to support all devices with responsive formatting and functions.

Lotto launched its interactive channel - MyLotto - in 2008 and re-launched it in 2012 to incorporate separate desktop and mobile websites.

Total MyLotto registrations have grown at around 60,000 a year and sales have risen to about 10 percent or total sales for the games offered.

Last June, Lotto launched native apps for both Android and Apple devices and there are now 180,000 registered app users.

"There is an increasing shift towards mobile devices with over 40 percent of interactive sales and site visits being made through tablets or mobile devices," Lotto NZ says.

"Overall, we believe there is still significant growth opportunity for the digital channel, as the current interactive player base (370,000) makes up a relatively small percentage of players that participate in our games throughout the year across all channels (2 million)."

The proposed new e-commerce platform will integrate with core Lotto NZ ERP, CRM and data warehouse systems via JBoss and MuleSoft middleware.

"The production system will be hosted by Lotto NZ, but we are open to proposals for hosted or cloud solutions for tools used to support the production environments," the tender says.