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When Microsoft's Professional Developers' Conference (PDC) kicks of in Los Angeles tomorrow, the company's new cloud platform, Azure, will be the centre of attention — and two Kiwi companies are poised to demonstrate how cloud computing can transform real businesses and deliver competitive advantage.
With the help of Microsoft partner and independent software vendor Intergen, Dunedin-based ticketing service TicketDirect is taking to the cloud to allow it to massively scale up its online services to manage even the largest of events.
TicketDirect has been poised to deploy on Azure for some time, but has had to wait for some of the pieces in development to arrive, says Intergen's director of strategy, Chris Auld. One of those key pieces is the cloud version of Microsoft's SQL database, SQL Azure.
TicketDirect founder Matthew Davey (pictured below) says the industry demands a system that caters for slow, steady sales interspersed with spikes of massive demand. The Azure platform provides just that capability.
“We want to be able to sell out an event as fast as customers can buy tickets,” says Davey. “But a challenge of this industry is finding a cost-effective way to handle demand spikes which require dramatic increases in capacity for very short periods."
Matthew Davey
Normally that would require major investment in server infrastructure and network capacity, he says. But cloud computing provides access to that without the capital cost.
“We’d need to purchase numerous servers just to manage peak load, which would lie idle most of the time — a huge waste of money and resources,” Davey says.
TicketDirect has been using an internally-developed ticketing system called Castellan, built on a foundation of the Microsoft Visual Basic 6 on Microsoft SQL Server 7 and SQL Server 2000 databases.
By moving to a cloud solution, TicketDirect will be able to scale its computing resources in response to real-time demand and also upgrade to the latest technology to support Castellan.
TicketDirect has grown from a small rugby-specific ticketing business to deliver services to major venues in Australia and New Zealand.
Davey says along with improved user experience and cost savings the new platform will support the business’ international expansion against multinational market heavyweights.
“As TicketDirect expands globally, we’ll be able to take advantage of Microsoft’s worldwide datacentres, which will help launch us further ahead of our competitors with the world’s fastest and most scalable ticketing system," Davey says.
Auld is being billed as one of the major speakers at this year's PDC due to his early and deep involvement in the development of Azure. He will deliver a session titled "Architecting and developing for Windows Azure" early on Monday.
"Chris has been a key global trainer for the Azure Services Platform early adopter program and brings extensive theoretical and hands on experience in building high scale web applications," the PDC website says.
TicketDirect expects to go live on its new platform early next year.
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