Las Vegas is all about the gaming industry, and increasingly the gaming industry is all about networked applications, as casinos take advantage of new IP/Ethernet-based converged voice/data/video networks to track literally everything that happens inside their doors.

Speaking at the Yankee Group Enterprise Executive Summit Monday at NXTcomm08, Mike Day, chief information officer for Cannery Casino and Hotel described how casinos — which once were regulated to silo all of their applications on separate, proprietary networks — are now managing and delivering an incredible range of apps over a single network infrastructure.

In a clear example of this trend, Day said his company is in the process of deploying what he claimed was the first fully Ethernet- and IP-networked slot machine system in Las Vegas in a new casino it is currently building. Day showed the design for the slot network, with dozens of small, 24-port Ethernet switches covering “slot banks” and feeding back into larger Cisco 6500 switches at the network’s core.

“What we will have is 2000 to 5000 devices in every single casino that are now communicating constantly back on to the network, and it allows us to know what our customers are doing,” Day said, predicting that by next year all Vegas casinos will be moving toward more standard-based gaming networks.

While almost all slot machines today are networked in some way, almost all casinos still rely on proprietary, serial networks to connect them, Day said. By turning to an industry standard Ethernet network, Cannery Casino not only can ride industry standards and deploy commercial switches, it also can run its slot “applications” alongside other apps on a single network, Day said.

It’s the ability to run all those networked applications — including slot systems, table games, customer loyalty card programs, point-of-sale systems, chip RFID solutions, hotel reservation systems, security surveillance systems — on a single infrastructure that pays the largest benefits, Day said. For instance, when a slot machine pays out a big jackpot, a networked surveillance camera automatically will be triggered to watch the customer take his or her money.

Beyond networking single properties, Cannery Casino also is building inter-property networks, allowing it to track customers across different hotels and casinos and enabling applications such as inter-casino “progressive slots,” where jackpots rise based on play across multiple casinos, Day said.

“Up until the last three or four years in the gaming industry, any application we added was viewed as an added cost,” Day said. “That’s all changed in the last couple of years. We realized there’s a lot of things the network is able do within our business to add value.”