A true computer and technology buff, Robert Willis—currently executive vice president and CIO/CTO at the M Resort Spa Casino—never actually thought he’d land in the gaming industry. Rather, his dream job was in national security. A laid-back, friendly gentleman, Willis has several interesting, and perhaps unexpected, facts in his past.
It all starts growing up in Missouri with his mother, who was a single parent with three children. “The fact that she raised us kids on so little money is just absolutely remarkable to me,” Willis commented. “How she kept us housed, clothed and fed, I have no idea. She deserves a Nobel Prize in economics.”
It was that humble upbringing that shaped Willis into the man he is today. His amiable nature was even noticed by some former co-workers. When working in an IT department years ago, his female colleagues said to him, “You were raised by a single mom weren’t you?” He answered yes, to which they replied, “Yeah. It’s because you’re polite.” “So I guess she did all the right things,” he said. “Hats off to her.”
A surprising fact: Willis only attended one semester of college. He recalls having arguments with professors about their technical ability and thinking that they wouldn’t be able to teach him anything that he couldn’t teach himself. “I was arrogant enough to think that I could do it on my own, and I’ve been rather successful at it,” he said. “I’m a self-taught programmer and self-taught networking guy. I’m probably the very last of that generation that could get away with that.”
Willis says he’s been a PC guy his whole life, and literally had his face pressed against the store glass looking at the first Radio Shack Model 1 that came out. He even bought his first computer before his first car. After teaching himself programming, it was then on to networking, and he just fell right into it, doing both ever since.
IT was really in its infancy in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Willis noted. The only places PCs could typically be found were in accounting groups. He says he oversaw the explosion of PCs from only being in small departments to being very pervasive throughout the whole organization.
Taking a look back at Willis’ own timeline, his first job was at a small computer store in ’86. From there, he worked for a law enforcement software company that sold to police departments throughout Oklahoma, Missouri and Illinois. In 1988, he went to work for the city of Maryland Heights, Mo., as their data manager. Then, he got a “really nice gig” as a programmer for Mosby Yearbook, a Times-Mirror subsidiary and health care publisher, throughout most of the ‘90s. There, he rose from programmer to IT manager and director of IT, with around 30 people working for him and 1,800 users.
During the height of the Internet bubble, he had a brief stint as a day trader. In 2000, he came to work for Anthony Marnell III as a DBA at TRIRIGA. There, he quickly became VP of IT. “That was in the early days,” he reflected. “I was employee No. 15 in the door at TRIRIGA, and it’s now a very successful software company that IBM purchased recently.”
About five years ago, Anthony Marnell asked Willis if he’d join him going into the gaming industry. Marnell was looking to buy some casinos in Laughlin and do their conversions. It was a quick decision for Willis, but a yes. “At that time it was more speculative whether the M would be built or not,” he explained, “because of all of the deal points that have to be put together for major construction. But that’s how I came into the industry.”
And the rest, as they say, is history. Despite not ever imagining he’d work in this industry, we think he’s settled in nicely. In fact, his two proudest professional accomplishments both have to do with his work at the M. “When I was put in charge of all the infrastructure on the technology side of the M, I had never built or opened a casino, and Anthony had the faith in me to do that,” he said.
His other proudest moment is when the M was nominated for a Computer World honors program in 2010. They did a case study and were accepted, then went to Washington, D.C., to attend the award ceremony. “It was a very arduous effort,” Willis recalled. “I don’t even remember 2008 at all. To do something that you’ve never done before and … turn around and make it world-class, stellar and on time with no faults, no hiccups—it’s a great feeling of accomplishment and pride.”
Coming from outside the industry, Willis cites gaming’s non-stop nature as the most unique part of IT in gaming. A 24/7 industry that never really closes, there’s not much time to shut down for maintenance. “Technology failure is just a stain if that occurs,” he said. “Knock on wood that you design and you develop contingencies on how to handle single points of failure, be it hardware or capacity issues, but you design around insuring that you minimize outages.”
What he’s seen change the most throughout his years in gaming is slot development. He says that a lot of the slot floors in Las Vegas are still serial-based. The M was one of the first full IP slot floors that was up, with ARIA and The Cosmopolitan recently joining that list. “One of the struggles we’re seeing with older properties is converting to Ethernet floors. You’re going to have to see a lot of investment by older properties to take on newer technology.”
As far as the industry’s biggest challenge, Willis believes it will be the adoption of technology. And with i-gaming on the horizon, there are regulation issues and the consumerism of technology. Rather than worrying about the threat to brick-and-mortar operations, he talks about the fact that new players are going to emerge. “Our competitor is likely to be someone like Facebook or Farmville that is going to enter into the gaming market,” he commented. “They have huge amounts of R&D available; they can throw millions of dollars to developing gaming tools or gaming systems that are purely online. What’s worse, then, is you’re going to have this divide between what people have in the virtual world versus what they have available in the brick-and-mortar and how you bridge that gap.”
And for IT’s challenges, he said: “We’re still challenging ourselves on how we can innovate and bring new product to our consumer and develop new games, drive customers to using more of the kiosks, more of the self-service type of solutions. We stand a lot of challenges from both an economic standpoint, and we’re working very hard toward developing new products that are very unique to us and very unique to gaming. We have some promotions scheduled to come out in late spring that will set us apart.”
Willis also shares that the M is in the final stages of being acquired by Penn National Gaming, and he is excited to see how he can contribute and what tools and technologies they currently have built that can get roots in the rest of the country.
And in his own future, you can find Willis pursuing his outside-of-work hobbies that include photographing nature on trips with his wife, or as you might be able to guess, reading about technology trends and topics. This guy is definitely always “plugged in.”
Amanda Huggett is the Managing Editor for Casino Enterprise Management. She can be reached at (701) 293-7775 or editor2[at]aceme.org.
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