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In a radical switch, Caesars signed up to cloud applications from Salesforce.com, Oracle, Infor and cloud platform services from Microsoft and AWS to support marketing, finance, human resources, gaming, hospitality, employee productivity and cybersecurity.
That has reduced complexity significantly, says Ottolenghi, but it has required finding a means to integrate the flow of information and processes between these different cloud environments. The company built a service orchestration layer between clouds and reduced all integration services to a simple set of micro-services between either an application and a data source or between two applications.
Oracle’s ERP Cloud was a good fit in that it allowed Caesars to quickly migrate to its financial and HR systems. Infor, meanwhile, enabled the casino and entertainment business to consolidate the 11 different property management systems that Caesars used into one. And the adoption of Salesforce.com has replaced the use of multiple sales and marketing apps.
Pivotal has been chosen to orchestrate the flow of data between these clouds. Caesars wanted to create a service orchestration layer between different clouds, and reduce all integration to a simple set of micro-services between either an application and a data source, or between two applications.
“What we’ve done is allow for the services to be connected in a simplified way. Not only can they speak to each other but they can exchange information in a totally different, connected way. So we can now govern all the enterprise analytics and streaming of data through all the different systems,” Ottolenghi says.
Ottolenghi predicts that its latest (and seventh) digital transformation project will usher in the biggest change for the organization. It focuses on co-ordinating all of the different gaming platforms and types of game that the company runs (including traditional casino, video, and eSports) into a single place. Once again, the organization will be looking to the cloud to help deliver this project.
“Cloud gives us leverage to build services that are not only better and cheaper but which can also match the speed and agility of the business,” Ottolenghi says.
Nebulous fears
The company’s investment in cloud is also driven by another factor: a trust in the security of cloud environments.
Many of the early fears of handing precious corporate data and applications processing to a third party have dissipated in the past few years. There are countless examples of businesses hit by data breaches and cyberattacks. “But you never hear of cloud infrastructure companies being broken into. They spend billions on securing those environments on our behalf to protect what is essentially our apps and data,” Ottolenghi says.
“So going to the cloud turns out to be more secure. The services come with features for identification and authentication that are military-grade,” he adds.
Improving the customer journey
But for Caesars, cloud isn’t just an enabler of efficiency, modernization and greater security. The ability to compute at scale means that technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are now within reach. Caesars is already deploying machine learning as part of its Salesforce.com service and for hospitality data within Infor.
“All of these get us to a better customer journey. For example, we’re currently launching a system that uses real-time analytics to send offers to customers’ mobile devices or email addresses, reducing the time it takes us to produce these by about a thousand per cent,” Ottolenghi says.
As that suggests, cloud is one big bet that looks like it will continue to pay out for Caesars.
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