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LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD D DAVID FARLIN VICE PRESIDENT AND CIO BOYD GAMING CORP. avid Farlin studied audio engineering in the 1980s with the hopes of becoming the next great music producer. That changed when one day as a hotel front-desk clerk he found himself helping to install an IBM System/38 computer system. Today, Farlin is Boyd Gaming's CIO and has more than 20 years of IT experience, specifically in the hospitality and gaming industry. Watching and participating in the evolution of technology has been gratifying, he says. However, he still likes to reflect on those early System/38 days. "History has a way of keeping things in perspective," he said. "There's definitely been a maturing of IT within the industry. It's fascinating to watch and participate in." Farlin joined Boyd in 2001 and spent five years with the company's Borgata property in Atlantic City. Borgata was the first complete ticket-in ticket-out slot floor in the industry, he said. He joked about the driving concern at the time being replicating the sound of coins falling into slot bins. "The problem was the floor seemed so quiet," he said with a laugh. In 2006, he came to Las Vegas to work on Boyd's Echelon project, which was mothballed and the site eventually sold. But through the years, Farlin has gained a reputation for his ability to either open or merge casino properties' IT systems. He has more than 13 casino-hotel openings or large-scale system conversions to his credit. Farlin and his team is now in the process of merging technologies with five casinos Boyd inherited from its 2012 purchase of Peninsula Gaming LLC. The five casinos are in Louisiana, Kansas and Iowa. All will eventually be tied into Boyd's IT systems and its award-winning B Connected rewards programs. The move increased Boyd's portfolio to 22 casinos. Since 2010, Farlin's team has also been working to transition much of its data storage to a cloud system. He talks about how many industries are learning to embrace cloud technologies, and gone are the days of needing hulking systems like the IBM System/38, or even far smaller ones tucked away in server rooms today, to store important information. He gives the analogy of cloud technology being a lot like electricity. We see the plugs and the outlets, but not the generators and transmission lines behind it. Farlin said the next evolution in gaming technology involves using data and information about player habits gained from the live gaming experience and doing the same for the online gaming applications. Then, the goal will be to find ways to transition the Boyd Gaming experience between the two. Figuring all of this out would be music to Boyd Gaming's ears. — By Brian Sodoma COMMUNITY EXEMPLARY AWARD W MARK RUBER DIRECTOR OF IT LAS VEGAS PAIUTE TRIBE 4A hen Mark Ruber came to America from Chile as a teenager, he quickly learned that he wanted to go into the technology field. He had dreams of working for giants like Google or Microsoft. At 29, that could still happen. But if it does, it will be the result of showing how he transformed a small operation in a big way in eight short years. As the director of IT for the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, Ruber oversees IT for a variety of operations that span the original 11-acre Paiute site in downtown Las Vegas as well as the tribe's offerings in the far north reaches of the valley. He guides IT efforts for the Paiute police station, downtown health clinic, administrative offices and his own IT building, as well as the tribe's Snow Mountain area smoke shop, Las Vegas Paiute Golf Resort, and even offers support for some tribal residents near the golf resort. He has overseen the transition to an electronic medical records system at the tribe's health clinic, which provides services not just to Paiute members but all Native Americans. Two years ago, he worked with CenturyLink to install about 35,000 feet of fiber optic line that changed the Internet capabilities of the tribe's golf resort, smoke shop and outlying residential units. "The resort and smoke shop only had a T-1 line, and the residents could only get Internet connection through satellite, which was really expensive and slow," he said. For the coming year, in a partnership with Cox Communications, Ruber will oversee the transition from an old Nortel network phone system in all the tribe's business and administrative locations to a new Cisco system. It will cover 86 phone lines between seven different buildings spanning the downtown locations and those in its rural areas. There is also an overall transition underway to cloudbased technologies throughout all the tribe's systems. The technological evolution isn't always openly accepted, Ruber admits. "We want to encourage people not to be afraid of it," he said. "Eight years ago, we had one server doing 50 things. I feel like we've taken it to the next level." Helping tribal members understand the IT changes is something Ruber enjoys. But seeing them embrace the change brings added excitement. "People don't like change. I completely understand that. But I'm surprised at how fast people get used to it," he added. — By Brian Sodoma | VEGASINC | 20 13 TOP TECH EXEC AWARDS 2-12_VINC102813_TOPTECH.indd 4 10/23/13 12:14 PM