Why i for the Casino Industry?

http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh101705-story03.html by Mary Lou Roberts If you frequent a casino and play the slots, roll the dice at the craps table, or double-down when the dealer shows a six at the blackjack table, chances are fairly good that somewhere nearby, an iSeries is chugging away. Even before the OS/400 platform had any of its recent names, the gaming industry has been one of the strongholds for the iSeries and its predecessors.                              In fact, Tom Reilly, vice president and general manager for Eastern North America for Bally Systems, a solution provider to the gaming industry, boasts that 100 percent of all of the casinos in Atlantic City and more than 70 percent of all of the casinos in the industry use an iSeries for something. "There are a wide variety of proven, industry-specific applications that have been cultivated over the years on the iSeries. It's to the point now where a new casino can pretty much be a turnkey startup," says Reilly. Reliability and stability are key ingredients in casino management decision making. After all, as much as any other business, casinos are a 24/7 business. If you've ever been lured by the glittering lights of a big casino, beckoning you to come in, sit down, and part with your money, you probably know that, unlike many more traditional businesses, the action is non-stop. Indeed, there's a lot more going on at 2 a.m. than there is at 2 p.m., though who would know? The design of a casino is cleverly planned (no windows, no clocks) to make sure you've lost all track of time as you lose your money. Reilly stresses the scalability of the iSeries as a major reason for the OS/400 platform's prominence in this industry. "The nature of the casino business involves constant transactions at high volumes. That means you need the high availability that the iSeries can deliver." "The casino gaming industry required stable, secure, and scaleable solutions and infrastructure to support their mission-critical, 24/7 operations," explains Stewart Applbaum, vice president of sales and marketing for iSeries reseller and application software provider Agilysys. "The iSeries, along with the software solutions available to the gaming industry, have proven to support these needs." Also pressing on this industry, as it is for many others, is the constant and vigilant attention that must be paid to regulatory compliance. Those auditors from the Nevada, New Jersey, and other state gaming commissions don't mess around, and changes in gaming regulations keep IT staffs on their toes. So, scalability and flexibility are high priorities, too. All of these attributes are important to Station Casinos, a long-time OS/400 platform user. Marshall Andrews, vice president and CIO for Station Casinos, says the company got its first AS/400 before he was onboard. (He guesses that it might have been around 1993 and the model might have been a D50.) The decision was made, he says, because all of the applications Station Casinos selected--hotel, finance, and purchasing--ran on the AS/400. Andrews underscores all of the reasons that the iSeries is a great choice for the gaming industry. The things that are most important to him include reliability, scalability, vendor strength, and support. "It performs 24 by 7 by 52, so we can serve our guests in the manner that made us the leader in our market and enables us to keep providing more service so we can continue to outpace our competition." Today, Station Casinos has three iSeries systems: three iSeries 825s--two high availability (HA) source machines (one with five out of six processors activated and the other with four out of six) and one HA target machine (with three out of six processors activated)-- in addition to one three-way iSeries 830, and two iSeries 720s. All of these machines use the DB2/400 database (obviously), and the systems are split between OS/400 V5R3 and V5R2 with a total of eight logical partitions. They have a consolidation underway to an i5 570 5/8-way box (which will consolidate the two 825s, the 830, and the two 720s onto that machine) with nine logical partitions acting as the HA source machine; the remaining iSeries 825 3/6-way and 4/6-way machines will be used as HA targets. Applications running on these systems include casino management--the Spin3 Casino Management System, which was "heavily modified and customized by our developers," says Andrews--plus the Lodging Management Systems 1.5 hotel property management from Agilysys, the World suite from Oracle, and additional software modules from the SPSS and Kronos. Other tools and systems software running on the iSeries machines include Vision Solution's Vision Suite 8.1/4.1 for high availability, Aldon's change management software, ACOM's check printing sofyware, Bytware's anti-virus software, ProData Computer Services' DBU database utility, and systems management software from IBM, and Vision Solutions. In addition to the iSeries, Andrews reports that Station Casinos has "numerous Windows servers for file and print services and supporting various gaming applications from Acres Gaming (table-player tracking, race and sports book wagering, kiosks, and so forth) as well as connectivity to applications through Citrix Systems middleware. Andrews says Station Casinos committed to the iSeries, but would consider other platforms "if IBM doesn't continue to make improvements or provide for research and development to add additional business applications." His wish-list for the future also includes better Web integration with RPG/free. Another long-time user of the iSeries is one of the largest casino hotel and gaming establishments in the world with multiple properties in multiple states. Their policies prohibit the mention of their name here, but trust me, if you've ever been to Las Vegas, you've heard of them. The current director of IT has been in the job for three years. He describes the company as "a conglomeration of three companies that each had their respective casino, hotel, and financial systems running on AS/400 and System/38 platforms. These systems date back to the mid-1980s." At that time, "Just about the only game in town was the System/38-based and AS/400-based casino system. Everything else flowed from there." Today, the organization has six mirrored iSeries systems (a total of 12 boxes), with varying hardware configurations running OS/400 V5R2. The vast majority of the casino, hotel management, and financial systems run on these systems. In addition, the data center has some Microsoft SQL Server databases (with which the iSeries applications communicate) for data warehousing and cross-property loyalty systems, and some Tandem fault-tolerant servers running other casino/hotel systems. Unfortunately--for the iSeries community, anyway--the iSeries is short-lived in this organization. This casino is currently transitioning away from the iSeries in favor of .NET-centric applications for the casino applications, and a Windows-based package for hotel applications. "The system that originally spurred the commitment to the iSeries has outlived its usefulness. There was a lot of functionality that the vendor could no longer provide." As a result, the decision was made by internal "Microsoft people" to rewrite the entire application in-house. Given that reliability and stability are perhaps the two most commonly heard attributes that keep casinos on the iSeries platform, is that a concern when moving to Windows? "Very much," this unnamed casino's CIO replies, "but the people who made the decision don't seem concerned. They believe that if there's a problem we can throw hardware at it." Is there anything IBM could do to keep this casino on the iSeries'? "It's too late," our CIO source says. So, with one long-time user that is quite committed to the iSeries for the long-haul, and one long-time user that is making tracks to move off the platform, we come to the story of Avi Resort and Casino, a relative newcomer to the iSeries. Avi's first and current machine, an iSeries 820, was just installed about two years ago to run a new property management application, an application that had previously run on a SCO Unix system. Avi's IT Manager, Stephen Gregg, and his two other IT team members had absolutely no AS/400 or iSeries experience. But in choosing the new property management system, they went through a full selection process that brought them to two finalists: one ran on a Windows platform, and the Agilysys property management solution that runs on the iSeries. What influenced their decision? Gregg was well aware of the predominance of the iSeries in the casino/gaming industry and had heard for years about the stability of the platform. In fact, Gregg laughingly tells the story of installing some network PCs back in the 1980s (working in another job) for long-time AS/400 advocate, John Keyes, founder of Computer Keyes. Gregg asked Keyes at the time what he was going to do with all those "big IBM boxes" when everything was replaced by Windows and smaller servers, and Keyes just laughed at him. "I was full of myself back then," says Gregg. "Now, I know that John was right. He told me the AS/400 would survive." Given that no one in Gregg's organization, including himself, had any iSeries expertise, how easy was the transition? Gregg admits that, at the start, he was a little intimidated. "But now it's great. It only took between three and six months until we got to the point where we were fully adept at using the system." What makes the iSeries a good choice for the casino/gaming industry? Keeping in mind his background as a Windows expert, Gregg's answer is interesting. Of course, he names stability, reliability, and ease of use--the same features touted by just about all iSeries boosters. "The application developers in the iSeries space represent a base of people who recognize and care about the quality of the product," he points out. "Developers in the Windows community are clearly catering to a base that wants to spend less money." Furthermore, Gregg is delighted with the iSeries support that he receives from his three biggest vendors and suppliers, IBM, Agilysys, and Bally Systems. Now Gregg is looking forward to upgrading to an i5 520, which he anticipates will be installed by December. In addition to property management--the application that triggered the move to the iSeries--Avi has now moved its player-tracking system to the iSeries. The slot accounting system is still running on an RS/6000 Unix box and, for the time being, it's likely to stay there. However, Gregg hopes that, "Ultimately we many have all of our applications running on the same iSeries box in different partitions." In fact, Gregg has big plans for the iSeries in his shop. Around the first of next year, its materials management system will be moved onto the iSeries. They will still have the back-of-the-house accounting system, the human resources system, and time and attendance on Windows and Novell servers, but Gregg plans eventually to move everything over to the iSeries. Interestingly enough, although a relative newcomer to the iSeries, Gregg sometimes sounds more like a dyed-in-the-wool, old-time AS/400 advocate. Don't even talk to him about WebFacing! "I can't think of any changes I want made to the iSeries," he says. "But there are some changes taking place that I'm resistant to, and one is WebFacing in front of a green screen. Sure, the GUI interface is nice and warm and fuzzy, but the green screen is more efficient. Give me two experienced check-in clerks--one with the GUI and one with the green screen--and the one with the green screen will check more guests in more quickly. And, I have fewer potential failure points." Even with some defections from the platform, it's likely that the iSeries will continue to be a mainstay in the gaming industry for the foreseeable future. As Agilysys' Applbaum says, "As the size of these operations continue to grow, the repercussion of solutions going down has great financial impact on businesses. Agilysys customers could realize losses in the millions for even the shortest downtimes. The iSeries provides the most reliable and available server platform for the software solutions that support these businesses." When I began this story, I did not set out to find three casinos with such different profiles--one long-time user still committed to the platform; one long-time user moving to Windows; and one shop new to the platform with all the enthusiasm and evangelism of the newly converted. It was somewhat a matter of chance that their stories fell this way. It may be, however, that these three casino industry customers accurately portray a microcosm of the complexity of the iSeries landscape. It's no secret that one reason for the initial success of the platform was the ISV applications base. The tasty meal that brought users to the iSeries table in the first place was not the wonders of OS/400 or even the reliability and stability that they now value so highly; it was the availability of applications and the strength of the ISVs who delivered and supported those applications. Love of the box itself came later. While IBM is out doing its best to win over new accounts (and clearly making some inroads in that department, with about 3,000 new customers in 2004 and maybe double that in 2005), how many are they losing because, while they were in the barn milking the cash cow for so many years, Microsoft stole the bull? Is it too late to get the message out? Are the programs that shore up those ISVs, enabling them to pump more development dollars into reviving the applications, coming too late? We'll find out. Mary Lou Roberts, a 35-year veteran of the information systems industry, is a new contributor to IT Jungle. In addition to her work as a reporter in the iSeries space, she has spent her career as a marketing and communications professional working exclusively with information technology publications and companies. She can be reached at WriterNewf@aol.com.

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