4,000 distributors’ earnings are not being put at risk

New terminals and a new network
15 years had taken a toll on the terminals of Danske Spil’s distributors, so in 2007 the time had come for them to be replaced. However, the new terminals also required better connections than the existing – costly – fixed telephone lines, so Danske Spil put the whole network contract out to tender. KMD tendered with Telia as a subsupplier. KMD assumed responsibility for the design, operation, servicing and monitoring, while Telia undertook the physical creation of a new network.

A pleasant surprise
"If I’m being honest, I didn’t think KMD could offer network solutions. So their interest took me completely by surprise," says Jørgen Falsvig, IT Director at Danske Spil. But when the final tender was on the table, he was in no doubt. "It was clearly the most attractive solution in financial terms, but this was combined with a very high level of assurance of the lines being up."

The contract’s service level agreement promises an uptime of 99.98% for the main cable, 99.8% for the country’s nine trotting tracks, and 99.6% for the 4,000 or so distributors in Denmark, Greenland and the Faroes. In practice the main cable is a double cable, so the risk of breakdown is effectively only theoretical.

A predicted bottleneck
For Danske Spil’s distributors the network connection is the lifeline for their daily earnings. On average, their combined revenue is DKK 4.3 million per day, so if a connection goes down on Saturday morning, the telephone at KMD rings immediately. The contract addresses this situation as far as possible with 24-hour monitoring of the whole network and regular reporting on traffic.

"Here we can monitor how much bandwidth we're using in all the parts, so we don’t need to suffer a breakdown before we intervene. We can expand the capacity before it becomes a problem," says Jørgen Falsvig.

However, if the network does fail, the response time is crucial, and Danske Spil was quick to make this clear.

"At the start everyone at KMD and Telia was probably not fully aware how important time is for us. But we visited them to make them aware of our situation, and this was enormously productive," he continues.

New distributors quickly on board
When Danske Spil gets a new distributor, it is vital that they don’t have to wait months for a connection. The new contract has brought the waiting time down to around four weeks, but KMD and Telia are working right now on a small revolution: a mobile terminal solution that can get the distributor up and running at lightning speed – until such time as the broadband is established.

"And for us it means money on the bottom line from the very outset," says an enthusiastic IT Director.

On time and on budget
Almost 4,000 distributors needed new connections established over a summer holiday period. This put our organisational skills to the test, but we passed with flying colours. However, it required such ruthless coordination that Danske Spil had to set up an internal unit to ensure that the distributors were ready when it was their turn.

“On the part of KMD and Telia I must say that everything has been handled very professionally. If we identified a problem, there was no discussion. They immediately set about resolving it. And we completed the project on time and on budget!” he says with a measure of pride.

The press was completely uninterested in the story, but the IT Director accepts this with a smile: “That’s probably the best indication of success. If something had gone wrong, they would have been onto us in a flash.”