Back to Vegas with Gaming and Leisure

Each year, a group of IT professionals participates in the annual Gaming and Leisure industry Event in Las Vegas to discuss common issues and trends among their properties (casinos). Typically, the group is made up of the CIO and IT Directors for the casino industry. This year, I had the opportunity to meet with them at the Wynn hotel on October 1 and 2.

They presented the state of the casino industry and the technology challenges they face running casinos in tough times. This was my second trip to Vegas in three weeks, and I didn’t see the tough times they were talking about in many of the casinos and on the Las Vegas Strip. But, away from the Strip, the scene gets a lot different—I saw many foreclosed homes and an enormous number of people begging for handouts on street corners.

I think that many people are still coming to Las Vegas, but they’re not gambling as much, and they’re spending more time sightseeing, eating in restaurants, and seeing shows. I left there with mixed feelings about the state of the economy on the Strip and how it relates to high unemployment and a bad housing market. I know the casino industry is heavily dependent on technology to manage staffs and revenues. That’s why IBM i servers play such an important role.

So, even though the economy is tough in Las Vegas and the casino industry is struggling, the IBM i platform remains quite strong in this industry. About two-thirds of the casinos I talked to run a majority of their business on this platform. The platform is big in this industry because of its reliability and its low cost of operation. Both small and large casinos use it for HR, hotel, and financial management.

In the past, the industry simply threw more people at the problem of managing their IBM i servers. Now, I see reductions in work force and outsourcing—a greater need to reduce the amount of labor required to monitor and run business processes.

Consequently, I expect even more focus on IT automation in the future. A big lesson I learned from Las Vegas is that. on the surface. the Las Vegas experience still looks strong, but behind the scenes, the casino industry has been impacted more than you might expect. Several large casinos have started outsourcing and new construction is basically at a standstill.

The Robot solution is ready to help by automating their computer systems. And, that’s one roll of the dice that isn’t risky—it always hits the jackpot.