The system is involved in probably 50% of Station Casinos' business activities, including player tracking, data warehousing and purchasing, Andrew says. It helps address Andrew's biggest concern as CIO: making sure the systems run smoothly 24 hours a day, because every minute of downtime means lost revenue.
"We try to build in a lot of redundancy," he says. "For networks we have dual switches and dual paths of fiber for our hardware. We use a lot of Microsoft clustering for the IBM side. . . . Redundancy and high availability is a key factor."
Security is also a big concern in a casino IT department, obviously. Protecting revenue from embezzlement is Andrew's top focus in this area, he says.
"This is closely audited and controlled. There can't be any leakage. It's not a casual thing. Every betting machine is like a point-of-sale cashier terminal," he says.
There are checks and balances to make sure employees can't take money or access sensitive information they're not supposed to see, he notes.
"Basically, we handle it by limiting who has access to what systems and what information," he says. "It's closely controlled and guarded. We're controlled here by the Nevada Gaming Commission , which has to approve all gaming systems. So it's gone through a lot of scrutiny and testing."
IT employees are not allowed to gamble at Station Casinos properties because they might have the ability to write code and cheat the system, or may have knowledge about the slot system's performance and know which machines pay out more often. Table games are off limits, too, to prevent collusion between dealers and other employees.
The surveillance department has the primary responsibility for finding cheaters among casino customers, but Andrew's staff has some involvement there too. "Our job is to make sure that there's security in place and that it's maintained, and that if there's any suspicion of anything happening, we'll be asked to assist," he says.
Beyond running day-to-day operations, maintenance and upgrades are key to the casino IT department's success. Currently, IT employees are writing a new race and sports system to get up to date with modern technology. The system will improve reporting on who customers are, allow betting on touch screens, and improve remote gaming and security. Andrew says the sports portion has been installed in about five properties and he hopes to have state approval to install the whole race and sports system in all 15 casinos by the end of 2007.
"That's a large project. We've been working on it for a while now," he says.
As for Super Sunday, Andrew is hoping nothing unexpected goes wrong but is also confident in his casino chain's technology. "I think the Bears and the Colts are spending more time preparing," he says. "We're pretty comfortable . . . we can handle the volume."
Andrew is also confident the Chicago Bears will stop Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts' high-octane offense.
"I'm a Bears fan, I used to live in Chicago," Andrew says. "I'm also a big football fan and I think defense always wins out in Super Bowls."