Earlier this year, Dell EMC hosted a webinar with Carahsoft Technology to provide an overview of our technology solutions for North American Tribes and casinos.

Al Ford, a technical sales rep here at Dell EMC, hosted the event and discussed how integrated storage solutions and infrastructure can help Tribes and casinos to evolve their data centers.

For example, Pechanga Resort & Casino worked with us to ensure it was making the best possible use of data and analytics to gain greater insight into its customers, inform its investments, and optimize day-to-day operations.

With data sources including loyalty cards, slot machines, and online and point-of sale transactions, the potential for Pechanga is huge.

“We’re already a data-driven business,” says John Kenefick, VP of IT & CIO for Pechanga. “We knew that the next step was to take advantage of the latest advances in big data. We wanted to eliminate silos and aggregate data from all sources in one place where marketing, financial, and other analysts could use it easily to gain insight and make business decisions.”

The objective, says Lee Torres, Pechanga’s VP of Marketing & CMO, is to be able to apply information in a timely and cost effective way to optimize each guest’s experience in two ways. “One is guest-facing. How, based on the data, should we invest in a customer, to offer an experience that gives them more of what they want? The other is internal. How can we streamline procedures and processes and provide our team members with information to deliver a better guest experience during the visit?”

A common concern for Dell EMC Tribal and casino customers and prospects is around the entry point and cost associated with deploying or updating storage and data center infrastructure. To that end, we’ve focused our range of customized, affordable and effective solutions with the following in mind:

• Ease of management – management is built throughout all solutions and products
• Improved effectiveness and responsiveness of existing infrastructure
• Improved responsiveness for remote offices
• High scalability and low-cost entry points
• Flexibility to adopt new technologies and avoid vendor lock-in

While the Pechanga team clearly recognized the potential pay-off and urgency of putting big data to work, they were unsure of where or how to start. After meeting with Dell EMC big data analytics consultants and data scientists, Kenefick decided to move forward with Dell EMC’s recommended first step: Develop a company-wide vision.

Dell EMC’s Big Data Vision Workshop service provided Pechanga a quick, low-risk way to explore what’s possible with big data and analytics in its business—and align stakeholders on the best way to move forward.

“It was a cool process because a lot of people from different functional areas of the company were all together in one room with the Dell EMC team and it was amazing how the ideas started to flow,” says Torres. “It wasn’t just ‘What can I do in marketing?’ and ‘What can I do in IT?’, it was ‘What can we do together as a company?’ and that really set the stage for where we are today.”

 A quality infrastructure provider should any provide flexibility to accommodate any workload, environment and experience. For our Tribal and casino customers we aim to provide solutions that are:

• Tailored to your workloads and paired to match architectural strengths
• Aligned to your IT environment, leveraging existing standards and technology, staffing and expertise, processes and operations
• Delivered for your consumption model – driven by your organization’s specific requirements and desired experience. Whether your casino is looking to build or buy, Dell EMC can help fill in the blanks, provide technical maps or provide the entire blue print with validated solutions, engineering systems and hybrid cloud platforms.

“The primary advice I would give to others is: find the right partner,” says Tjeerd Brink, VP of Finance & CFO. “Dell EMC helped us think outside of our box and identify areas where we can really use big data to help us grow our business.”

Torres agrees. “Dell EMC brought big data expertise—and not just about data, but about the structure and the processes we needed to develop. We were able combine their expertise with what we do really well, which is run a casino. It’s been a great partnership.”

If you’re interested in learning more about our work with Pechanga Resort & Casino, check out the customer profile here or watch a video about their deployment here.