In our latest Three Minutes With, Juan Aguirre, Chief Commercial Officer of Ilkari and Okens’ leadership team, spoke with Jennifer Kite-Powell, Head of Content at Okens. Juan shares his insights on how vital control and privacy are to your business, the challenge iGaming operators face with control and how technology can change the game for operators.
Jennifer Kite-Powell (JKP): First, congratulations on the acquisition of Okens Domains; it’s a big win for both companies. As Ilkari’s Chief Commercial Officer, what do you think this means for Okens?
Juan Aguirre (JA): Thank you. First, we are excited to bring Okens Domains to the Ilkari family. We know our investment in Okens will bring sovereignty and privacy to iGaming operators’ digital assets and infrastructure. Second, this investment will fill the structure and technology gap the iGaming market needs to achieve privacy and sovereignty. It also allows Okens to triple its service offering.
JKP: I don’t think the industry talks about domain offerings this way, so is this acquisition more about bringing sovereign technology to the iGaming market and enabling Okens to fill the gaps around domain privacy and digital territory protection.
JA: Yes, with Ilkari’s sovereign technology solutions – certified data centre, colocation and sovereign cloud – Okens Domains will now be able to offer enhanced privacy and operational control to its globally expanding iGaming customer base. That’s control.
JKP: Okay, so the elephant in the domain room is in control. What is the single biggest challenge for the domain market when it comes to control?
JA: There are multiple challenges, so I’ll be cheeky and list two, not just one.
JKP: [laughs] Sure, we’ll allow it. 🙂
JA: One of the significant challenges is ensuring that organizations have a designated person responsible for managing domains. I know that seems obvious, but we frequently see no designated person or team within an organization to manage domains. If there is no ownership or management, there is no control.
But where should that domain management sit? In marketing, IT, legal, or with the web team? It all depends on company structure, and it is not standardized like other roles. However, there must be clear ownership of domain management at a company alongside documentation and an understanding of the strategic importance of your domains.
The second challenge in controlling your domain is that you actually have to maintain control over a number of adjacent domains, which is what we call your digital territory. The objective is to prevent these domains from being hijacked, expiring and then re-sold, etc., which has the potential to lure people away from your core domain—which is your window to the digital world.
This is made more difficult by the fact that your priorities shift over time as the markets evolve and devolve. Just look at how the .AI domain has changed—it is now the most popular domain on the internet today, but its history started as a designation for the British territory of Anguilla in the 1990s when it was given the .AI domain name. Then ChatGPT changed everything, and the market for the .AI domain was a champagne supernova.
JKP: That is an excellent example of a market evolving in a way no one anticipated. Can we get back to sovereignty – what role does sovereignty play in the domain industry?
JA: You may think you own and control a domain, but do you ever? The reality is you hold a domain, but you don’t own it.
If you forget to renew it, it becomes fair game for someone else. If you register it under only one specific Top-Level Domain (TLD), for example, .com, and it’s still available under .co.uk or .net, etc., then you just lost your domain brand because you didn’t have a plan. With clever SEO, that great domain you hold can be outdone in just a few months.
The same applies to privacy–taking out standard Whois protection is not a guarantee of your privacy. Here at Okens, we believe if you want even a tiny degree of sovereignty, you have to control a territory of domains, not just A domain. And, if you think you have a right to privacy, then companies need to look to more evolved Whois protection services.
JKP: It is interesting that after all these years, companies still don’t treat domains like assets or part of their digital territory. So, we all know this industry carries a lot of risks, so what can brands do to ensure they mitigate their risk when it comes to control of costs and data in igaming?
JA: Prevention is always better than cure, and that is especially the case with domains. Domain squatting and impersonations are very difficult to resolve and can severely damage player confidence, operator revenue, and brand.
Proactively analyzing your key domains and getting valuable insights can help secure your digital territory. Sometimes, it is as simple as registering your domain under different TLDs or even with common typos. Even those simple practices reduce investment and massively mitigate risk. Okens has the tools to help you assess these risks and successfully reduce them. Again, that’s control.
However, another risk this industry has to manage is the loss of control over its costs.
Cloud is a massive opportunity for operators to scale, ramp up or down as needed, but it’s also a significant risk when it comes to cost control. Recent price hikes from some of the large public cloud operators or by companies such as VMware can make costs untenable overnight. We are seeing a trend–and not just in the iGaming sector–of companies moving away from public cloud to private cloud solutions and data centre colocation services. This technology and services help operators control costs and their data. This may be daunting at first, but working directly with certified data centres, like Ilkari’s modern, certified data centre in Colombia, provides additional simplicity and control.
JKP: This puts technology right in the center of the conversation. The domain market has
traditionally not had the greatest tech to help it succeed; what can Ilkari do to change that?
JA: Technology is essential, but it’s not the only requirement. I firmly believe that people are the critical requirement, and in particular, people who understand your business and your challenges and actually care.
Part of Ilkari’s mission is to keep learning, which means we prioritize understanding our customers and finding solutions that will allow them to succeed. Technology plays a role here as well. It’s crucial, and with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) in how companies do business, it opens up a vast market of what’s possible and what needs to be controlled.
This is why Ilkari is combining the foundational elements of a business through domains, private cloud, and data centre expertise to allow enterprises to manage their digital territory better.
It’s early days, but 2025 will bring exciting Ilkari developments.
