WMS Gaming's new 50,000-square-foot facility in South Meadows allows the company to consolidate its Reno operations and gives the company's crucial business development teams room to grow, says WMS president Orrin Edidin.
WMS officially opened its new two-story facility on Trademark Drive on Friday. The building, built by United Construction, centralizes WMS engineering teams that have worked from separate locations in the Truckee Meadows for several years, as well as provides a single point of operations for systems development, warehousing and distribution.
More than 100 people are expected to work in the new facility, Edidin says. The Reno teams are responsible for development and implementation of WMS' wide-area progressive jackpot systems that are used in Native American casinos and other gaming jurisdictions.
"More and more in the gaming industry all developments are moving to systems-based or networked-based to drive gaming systems, and the Reno group is developing those systems. (The new building) will give our folks all the tools and facilities they need," Edidin says.
Publicly traded WMS Gaming entered the Reno market in the late 1990s, and in the spring of 2000 the company acquired Bigfoot Software, a small Carson City-based developer of network data systems. WMS is headquartered at Waukegan, Ill., north of Chicago.
"Reno is one of our most important regional offices," Edidin says. "It is one of our largest system and product development groups, and it is critical to the success WMS has had. It will help us become a leader in networked gaming products."
