Seatem and Macquarie Hosting partner to enable
Australian acts to compete on global stage
Sydney - January 2010 -
Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie Telecom, today
announced it has signed $1.5 million deal with Seatem, the
world’s largest entertainment ticketing group. Under the
deal Macquarie Hosting will host Seatem’s mission critical
white-label ticketing application ENTA, and provide the
fully-managed
virtual hosting solution it requires to expand operations
locally and capitalise on its global success. Seatem operates
in more than 22 countries across the globe and manages an
average of 42 million ticket transactions per year. In Europe
and North America, Seatem currently provides the customisable
web platform used to manage ticket sales and marketing
applications by organisations including the NBA, NFL, UK Premier
League Football, Walt Disney and London and New York theatre
companies. In Australia, the Seatem platform is used by the
Queensland Performing Arts Centre to manage ticket requests and
transactions for more than 5,000 seats across multiple venues,
close to 800,000 tickets per year. The Macquarie Hosting
partnership will enable Seatem to further expand its customer
base locally to include other leading Australian entertainment
organisations. John Godwin, Managing Director of Australasia
for Seatem, said, “Our ticketing software can handle up to 6.5
million simultaneous transactions. We needed a
server hosting solution that was equally scalable and
equipped to provide a reliable 24/7 service for our customers.
“We chose Macquarie Hosting for its proven experience working
with online transaction based businesses as well as its
specialisation in the design and implementation of complex
managed hosting environments. This partnership gives us the
confidence we need to guarantee our customers low latency, fully
redundant services, regardless of how quickly we, or they,
grow.” Virtualised solution allows Australian entertainment
venues to compete with ticketing giants
The ENTA solution gives any venue, regardless of size, the
ability to customise a fully scalable ticketing interface that
crosses multiple sales channels including call centre, website
and box office transactions. For ENTA clients, this makes them
more accessible online, creates a direct channel to market and
empowers them to sell more tickets with greater ease and
confidence. More importantly, clients can collect vital
marketing intelligence and maintain a direct relationship with
their customers. “Our partnership with Macquarie Hosting adds
further credibility to the ENTA value proposition, enabling
small to mid size venues, ticketing companies, festivals and
events secure and easy access to a world class ticketing
service. Venue customers feel that they are dealing directly
with the event brand or our ticketing services customer at all
times. With a vibrant Arts, and Sporting community in Australia,
we expect to match our global successes locally and assist a
number of our venues, ticketing services customers, festivals
and events to make it easier for consumers to access and
purchase tickets,” Godwin said. The
virtualised
dedicated server solution from Macquarie Hosting gives
Seatem the scalability it requires to increase server capacity
to cope with peaks in traffic across its clients’ websites and
mission critical applications as well as the flexibility to
quickly scale the system as the business grows locally. Seatem
also benefits from Macquarie Hosting's
PCI Compliance accreditation from the Payment Card Industry
Data Security Standards Council (PCI DSSC). This means it
complies with industry online business transaction requirements
and can secure customer information effectively. The
high-availability network infrastructure with redundant
firewalls, load balancing, switches and internet ports provide a
low latency experience while high-speed tape backup and SAN
storage services provide added redundancy. Seatem’s
mission-critical ENTA applications and white labelled web
platforms will be housed in Macquarie Hosting's ISO and ASIO T4
certified
data centre, the Intellicentre - Ends - | 
