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E D U C A T I O N I DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION & TECHNOLOGY SERVICES NEVADA STATE COLLEGE Funding – the annual operations budget is $118,000 ¬– comes from tech fees that are paid through student enrollments, as well as some state funding. Today, his staff numbers 11. This year has been spent working largely on a pair of major initiatives. The first was the January launch of a single sign-on portal for the campus, and culmination of eight months of work. This, he explains, was the culmination of several years of work "moving it in a direction where we could have single sign-on for all of our various systems. We have a lot of disparate systems that were not really linked to each other. This portal connected all of them to one place to make it much more convenient for faculty, staff and students." The second was another launch, that of a mobile app. Chongtai, 38, describes it as "somewhat linked to the portal. They share some components, so we can message students and faculty through one site and then it goes out to the mobile app, as well." H O T E L BRIAN CHONGTAI t's not too grandiose a statement to say that Brian Chongtai is playing a major role in nudging Nevada State College into the future. "I think I've done a lot for the college here in recent years as far as building the infrastructure for the institution," Chongtai said. "We are a fairly new institution – the school started in 2002 – and in my role here I kind of started up the IT department from the ground up beginning with my arrival in 2004." A Las Vegas native, Chongtai attended UNLV, which is also where he worked before coming to Nevada State College. "I served as the IT department's technology coordinator. I actually ran the servers that managed the student labs and maintained the infrastructure behind them. That was sort of a big thing back in that time." Chongtai's greatest challenge since day one, he reflects, has been working with limited staff "and basically trying to find resources when we didn't have much funding with which to find them." G A M I N G A CHRIS DEROSSI CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER ULTIMATE GAMING 6A The app allows students to register for classes, look up camps maps and check the school's directory. "We've got feeds to all of our social media sites. They can look at their financial aid, their student account; pretty much all of the things that they would traditionally go to our portal for they can now do on a mobile device. We're trying to make it easier and improve access." Chongtai is already hard at work on projects for the coming year. "We are trying to streamline the admissions process now, and we are always trying to improve on our portal system and our mobile apps. We have a lot of efforts going into those to make them even better than they are now. We have an online application system that we have had some complaints about. We are looking to perhaps partner with an external vendor. One of the things we'd like to do is link that online application system into our mobile app and portal. That way everything is in one system." — By Howard Riell / ll Chris Derossi did this year was make it possible to launch the first, and at the time only, legal online poker site there has ever been in the United States. "There is a huge demand in this country for the ability to play casino-style games, specifically poker, online," the 48-year-old Derossi said. "It has been available illegally for the better part of a decade. Two years ago, the Justice Department shut down the biggest illegal operators, which left a lot of Americans clamoring for a legitimate option, so we are filling that need." Derossi has been working on this technology for 10 years. Until recently, that meant that all of his customers had to be outside the United States. With the changing in U.S. law "we are finally able to do what we wanted to do in the beginning, which is bring it to U.S. customers." Derossi's accomplishment is not as much about invention, because internet poker is not new; it has been around in most parts of the world for a long time. "What's new here is that we are the first company to comply with the rigorous regulatory standards of the Nevada Gaming Commission and Gaming Control Board, and that does involve a lot of technology. But it's really about making sure that the product is up to their standards." A veteran of Apple, where he served as chief architect, Derossi was responsible for the team that developed Macintosh Operating System version 7.01 When he began working on this online poker technology he had just one person at his side. Today, his colleagues number 50. He considers himself "a technologist at heart. I have been a techno geek my entire life. I grew up largely in Silicon Valley in California where poker card rooms ex- ist, and learned to play poker in the brickand-mortar card rooms there. When the internet came along it was a very natural and obvious fit between the two." The road lies open before him. "The company I started was acquired in October 2011 by essentially the same principals who own Station Casinos," he relates. "We are now taking what I had created as a business-to-business offering and bringing it directly to consumers under the Ultimate Poker brand." Nevada, of course, became the first state to make it legal. "We will be launching in New Jersey as soon as they allow the operators to go live, and we're going to bring it to the rest of the country as the federal and state governments license it and make it legal. Then, it's onto the rest of the world, as well, under a global brand." — By Howard Riell | VEGASINC | 20 13 TOP TECH EXEC AWARDS 2-12_VINC102813_TOPTECH.indd 6 10/23/13 12:15 PM