It was only a matter of time before the gaming industry discovered SOA, and that appears to be the case after reading this article. "Walk down the Las Vegas Strip, and it is SOA that drives much of what the city has to offer, according to Tim Stanley, chief information officer for Harrah's, the casino and entertainment company. "'We have eight properties in Las Vegas, and each has its own IT systems, but all eig It was only a matter of time before the gaming industry discovered SOA, and that appears to be the case after reading this article. “Walk down the Las Vegas Strip, and it is SOA that drives much of what the city has to offer, according to Tim Stanley, chief information officer for Harrah’s, the casino and entertainment company. “‘We have eight properties in Las Vegas, and each has its own IT systems, but all eight are tied together,’ explains Mr Stanley. ‘A customer might be staying at Caesar’s but wants a meal at Margheritaville or to go to a club. All that is connected together and recognized in our loyalty scheme, Total Rewards.’ The fact of the matter is that any problem domain and/or enterprise that are volatile by nature, casinos being an example of that, will typically benefit from SOA. In essence the agility that’s built into the architecture allows the organization to shift constantly without a huge penalty in redevelopment and redeployment. “Mr Stanley says meeting such deadlines would have been much more difficult had Harrah’s had to write new applications or transfer data to its servers at the same time as keeping the casinos running.” Moreover, if you read more of the article, SOA is also leveraged to manage odds, which is basically the same thing as risk to an insurance company…it’s everything. Knowing Vegas I suspect the other hotels will jump on the SOA bandwagon, if they have not done so already. Also, they have the capital and the urgency to make the investment in SOA, which is large but well worth it once you understand the future benefits. Software Development