International award boosts global aspirations of New Zealand company
New Zealand firm TicketDirect is looking for rapid international growth on the back of winning the prestigious Hong
Kong-based IDC Enterprise Innovation Award for 2010 for the south-west Pacific region earlier this month.
TicketDirect International, which is New Zealand’s largest sports ticketing company with a strong presence in the
entertainment sector both here and in Australia, won the award for its for its bold move into cloud ticketing
technology.
Mathew Davey, CEO of TicketDirect, said winning this international award ahead of large New Zealand companies such as
Air New Zealand ALGIM, Dunedin Casino, Kordia and Integral Axon gives the company great confidence as it begins to look
for international opportunities outside of Australasia.
“In receiving this award, the judges noted that the investment we have made in cloud technology was ‘a bold move for a
small, in global terms, company, wanting to expand on to the world stage.”
“This award establishes our world class technology credentials and helps raise the profile of New Zealand IT firms,” he
said.
Established 12 years ago in Dunedin, TicketDirect is already the provider of ticketing services to 80 venues across New
Zealand and Australia, TicketDirect is now confidently targeting the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom on the
back of its cloud computing technology and the credibility that this award provides.
“There will not be an event we can’t handle. Cloud hosting really is the Holy Grail of ticketing,” he said.
What is cloud computing? It’s a model of computing where services and applications are hosted on, and can be accessed
through, the internet.
“It allows us Davids to take on and defeat the Goliaths like Ticketek in Australia or Ticketmaster in America without
the huge capital outlay, while still retaining the nimbleness of a company our size. We just couldn’t take on these big
guys with their billion dollar turnovers if we had to invest in the infrastructure needed to compete on this scale.
“The success in ticket selling is being able to handle the peaks without having to have expensive hardware sitting
around during the non-spike times. Because only a few companies could handle the big demand days, the rest of us where
not invited to contest the big deals. Now we can,” he said.
TicketDirect is the only New Zealand company, and one of only 20 in the world, in Microsoft’s TAP (Technical Adoption
Programme) for its new Azure cloud computing platform. Matthew Davey addressed the Computerworld Hong Cloud Computing
symposium earlier this month.
“Cloud computing means we can scale our operations at an incredible rate and it is this elasticity that is particularly
appealing to us – in fact, there are probably any number of companies in New Zealand that will be able to take on much
bigger rivals overseas once they understand and adapt cloud technology to their operations.
“We are able to go from the 10 servers we have got to 10,000 servers if we anticipate a spike in demand. The world is
littered with examples where tickets have gone on sale for the first time and the ticket company’s servers have crashed
because they cannot keep up with demand.
“Not with TicketDirect and cloud hosting. We can go from selling around 6000 tickets a day to 100,000 tickets an hour if
we need, and we can do it anywhere in the world. Cloud hosting removes location from the equation, and for New Zealand
companies, that is pretty exciting,” he said.
World leading technology is not new to TicketDirect. Earlier this year it unveiled 11 unmanned automated kiosks and,
utilising technology similar but more advanced than at airport check-ins. These New Zealand-made kiosks are in all
Warehouse outlets throughout Canterbury, the West Coast and South Canterbury and were part of TicketDirect’s overall
marketing strategy when it won the prestigious contract to provide ticketing services to both the Crusaders franchise
and the Canterbury Rugby Union in 2010.
“Kiosks allow sporting organisations to put ticketing in front of customers where they are making their buying
decisions. It also allows much more targeted and effective ticket marketing and early indications are that it is
extremely successful and well accepted by the purchasing public.”
ENDS