Power 7 and Business Analytics (Smart Analytics)

With its mission to enhance the overall quality of life of the Chickasaw people, the Chickasaw Nation oversees a number of businesses in its jurisdictional territory, which encompasses all or parts of 13 counties in south central Oklahoma. Headquartered in Ada, Oklahoma, the Chickasaw Nation’s businesses benefit its tribal population of 49,000, which also includes Chickasaws in Mississippi and Louisiana. These businesses range from convenience stores, restaurants, retail stores, hotels, a bank, four radio stations, a theater and 17 gaming locations, the largest of which is WinStar World Casino, located one hour from Dallas, Texas. The proceeds from these businesses assist in providing services, such as education, health and wellness, children and youth, community, culture, elders, employment, family, housing, legal, and government, to tribal members.

The Business Challenge:

Rob Jacks, the CIO of the Chickasaw Nation’s Department of Commerce, is responsible for strategically managing the information technology required by the tribe’s extensive and rapidly growing enterprises, which include one of the three largest casino operations in the United States. Jacks oversees the hardware, software, data and communications infrastructure that gathers, reports on and analyzes all the financial gaming and business transactions of the entire system.

In addition to improving the speed and reliability of the current system, Jacks wanted to correlate and strategically use the vast amounts of information being generated by the IT systems. This data included operations data and information provided by 15,000 electronic gaming machines and thousands of surveillance cameras, which generate multiple petabytes daily. He knew this information could provide him with crucial data about clients and potential clients that could, in turn, be used to improve the customer experience and grow the businesses. To execute on this initiative, he would need to increase the speed and reliability of the hardware, software and network, and put the right information into the hands of the right decision makers.

Jacks called Mainline Information Systems, an IBM® Premier Business Partner, which had previously been selected through a competitive bidding process. “We were looking for a partner to support and keep pace with our growth,” Jacks explained. “Mainline had the depth and breadth of services that we needed and was savvy about where technology was going.”

The Mainline account executive put together a team of experts to assess the existing infrastructure and to strategically plan for the needs of the Chickasaw Nation Commerce Division’s future operations. Mainline developed a solution that included the IBM Power 770 System for the enterprise infrastructure foundation, the IBM BladeCenter H Chassis and Express Servers for a flexible architecture for virtualization, and the IBM Smart Analytics System 5710 for its pre-integrated business analytics capabilities.

The Solution:

IBM Power 770 System
The IBM Power 770 System provides servers and software that are the foundation for an enterprise infrastructure. Express servers are optimized with the ability to securely run multiple applications on AIX, i, and Linux operating systems on a single server, allowing the management of fewer systems with lower cost and higher utilization. The Power 770 consolidates workloads and significantly reduces costs throughout the infrastructure. Power Systems software options enable simplified management of both physical and virtual environments, including the ability to control data center energy usage and orchestrate processing resources.

The IBM BladeCenter H Chassis and Express Servers
The BladeCenter chassis provides industry-leading performance, innovative architecture and a solid foundation for virtualization in order to drive the most demanding performance and memory-intensive workloads. The BladeCenter allows more power in less rack space, while reducing power consumption by as much as 35 percent.

IBM Smart Analytics System 5710
The IBM Smart Analytics System 5710 offers pre-integrated analytics and information management capabilities on a compact, cost-efficient system, enabling quick deployment of business intelligence applications on a powerful, warehousing foundation. Based on IBM System x, the integrated components include InfoSphere Warehouse Departmental Edition, IBM System Storage DS3500 Express, IBM System x 3630 M3 and Cognos 10 for Business Intelligence: Query and Reporting.

The Result:

“Mainline created a comprehensive and cohesive architecture and set of platforms to keep pace with the Chickasaw Nation’s high transaction volumes, from network-enabled slot machines to surveillance cameras to back-end number crunching and business intelligence,” Jacks stated.

“What makes this Mainline solution so exciting is the business intelligence component—the IBM Smart Analytics System 5710,” Jacks said. “By correlating, consolidating and mining the financial, gaming and surveillance information, we are better able to determine customer preferences—the popularity of certain machines, preferred games, the appeal of incentives and promotions to specific groups, the amount spent by each customer per game and visit, the timing and seasonality of customer visits, the length of each visit, events that attract customers, and so on.”

“The ability to clearly track and mine specific data that allows us to maximize the customer experience has led to a 15 to 20 percent growth in revenues for the Commerce Division in recent years,” Jacks emphasized. “Mainline’s comprehensive business intelligence solution has helped the business grow. If we didn’t have this partnership with Mainline, we would never have been able to grow at double-digit rates,” he concluded.