Here is how we helped our client enable their customers achieve up to 50% cost reduction in event management and sell 2 Mn tickets.
Our client offers a complete array of custom tickets, parking permits, roll tickets, design, and packaging and distribution services in the United States. They had been selling tickets using a portable box office ticket device called KIS for the past 20 years. The traditional system that was hardware-based was developed a long time ago and was not scalable.
The client wanted to leverage new-age technologies to transit the features and functions for enhanced user experience, tracking, integration, and scalability. They wanted to migrate the features and functionalities of their traditional KIS hardware to an Enterprise Ticketing System (ETS) called “KIS Ticket”. However, unlike other online ticket applications, KIS Ticket is intended for use by professional box office managers and their staff. The ETS would enable the sale of general admission event tickets, parking passes, wristbands, event credentials, merchandise, and access control.
We developed a two-part system - a web application for admins and buyers and a mobile application for sellers.
The web application that we developed can be used to manage customers, design ticket templates, provide customer support, manage events, manage buyers and sellers, and generate reports. Also, buyers can view events, purchase tickets online, view order history and send and view messages from the customer support team.
The mobile application provides the ability to search for specific events and sell tickets or perform actions as defined by the manager. The app can capture digital signature, view and print receipts, scan tickets and refund tickets. We have also integrated with third-party payment gateways to enable online ticket sales. The solution can also be integrated with other third-party hardware devices for ticket scanning, printing, and card swipe.
Dramatically increased agility and focus on core value competencies using our dedicated team of software developers.
We identified and set up a dedicated team of 20 members initially and the team was divided into 3 onshore and 17 offshore members. The team was scaled to 40 members after a month into the project. The team consisted of front-end and back end Java developers and QA engineers. Front-end developers skilled in AngularJS and HTML were deployed for the project. We also included a dedicated technical architect, who had the freedom to take decisions whenever needed. The team worked in the agile & microservices mode and ensured continuous production releases. The primary challenge was to understand the complexities involved in the ticketing process with multiple stakeholders involved. We could mitigate this by extensive 6 weeks working assessment and consulting sessions with their stakeholders. This is a long-term engagement project and we continue to work with the client for several enhancements and customization requirements.
The highly secure and scalable system that we developed for the client provided them real-time access to sales and check-in data and helped them manage events 24/7, from any device.
We developed a ticketing system using the client’s core ticket engine, running on the Amazon web services cloud platform. Using AWS enabled the client leverage several benefits from a broad set of Amazon’s compute system tools, highly scalable processing power, security protocols, storage capacity, and analytics backend services. The microservices architecture we used in the system allowed each service to be deployed independently and scaled individually. Even updating, upgrading or maintenance could be done separately for each service while the other services continue to run unaffected.
AWS services used:
- Amazon EC2 – Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction.
- Amazon RDS – RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.
- AWS Lambda – Lambda is a serverless computing platform. It lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers.
- Amazon S3 – S3 provides object storage through a web service interface.
- AWS Auto Scaling – AWS Auto Scaling monitors applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance.
- Amazon Route 53 – Route 53 is a scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is an extremely reliable way to route users to internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.
- Amazon Aurora – Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud.
- Amazon API Gateway – API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, CORS support, authorization and access control, throttling, monitoring, and API version management.
- Amazon SNS – SNS is used to send out notifications to end users using mobile push, SMS, and email.
- Amazon SES – SES was used to setup email communication from within the application.
- Amazon CloudFront – Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data.
- AWS CodeDeploy – AWS CodeDeploy was used to automate application deployments to Amazon EC2 instances.
- AWS WAF – AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect web applications and APIs against common web exploits that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.
The system has host-level security with Amazon EC2 and additional security features are added through AWS WAF in-line with CloudFront to defend against attacks such as cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and DDoS.
The system that we developed allows users to set up an event and start selling tickets in less than 5mins.
The system is so simple to use, that setting up an event is extremely easy and fast. The system is also PCI-DSS compliant and EMV-certified to prevent counterfeiting, theft, and fraud. It provides users with real-time cloud-based reporting, all from one integrated dashboard. Being hosted on AWS allows ondemand provisioning of additional servers, which helps to constantly adjust capacity and costs to actual traffic patterns. It also allows event organizers to sell tickets anywhere across all devices seamlessly, thus, helping event planners to cut event management cost by up to 50%.
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