Based in Vienna, Austria, Wien Ticket is one of the country’s leading service providers for entertainment and events companies. Major cultural institutions, theaters and other venues in Vienna rely on the experience and knowledge of Wien Ticket. The company offers a comprehensive service portfolio covering many aspects of event management, including online ticketing, telephone ordering, sales offices, customer relationship management and marketing. Together with over 700 resellers, Wien Ticket operates a large sales network and handles ticketing for theater performances, classical music recitals, musicals, pop and rock concerts, museums, as well as sporting events and a high-speed catamaran cruise line. In total, Wien Ticket processes more than 3.5 million tickets annually for events across Austria.
At-a-Glance
WT Wien Ticket GmbH deployed SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications, creating a solid foundation to offer a broad portfolio of events-related services including online ticketing, telephone ordering, customer relationship management, and events marketing to popular cultural and entertainment organizations in Austria. The SUSE solution provides a stable, reliable platform for the company’s mission-critical ticketing application and helps Wien Ticket ensure a fast and efficient user experience, helping the company process 3.5 million tickets per year.
The Challenge
As an innovative and flexible full-service provider, Wien Ticket manages event marketing, customer relationship management, ticket sales and distribution for Vienna’s top venues and organizations. Offering tickets for a huge variety of shows, museums and sporting events means that traffic on Wien Tickets online platform is always high.
Particularly in the run up to popular events — such as the Eurovision Song Contest, high-profile local football or ice hockey matches, or the annual Vienna Jazz and Rock in Vienna festivals — Wien Ticket must be able to cope with sudden spikes in demand to ensure that customers can purchase tickets rapidly and reliably.
Mag. Matthäus Zelenka, CEO of Wien Ticket, explains: “To be a reliable partner to great institutions and organizations in Vienna, our online ticketing system needs to be available at all times so that customers can book events quickly and easily. If our servers were to go down for even an hour, it would damage our reputation and revenues.”
Preparing for an application upgrade of its mission-critical system, Wien Ticket took the opportunity to migrate from its existing open source Linux operating system to a fully supported and vendor-certified enterprise Linux distribution.
“We needed an operating system that would offer extremely high performance levels and stability,” says Zelenka. “We also wanted to be able to count on prompt, reliable support, in the event that any issues arose.”
“We are confident that choosing the fully certified SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications with 24/7 support was the right decision to minimize our business risk.”
SUSE Solution
After performing a comprehensive analysis to identify any potential operational risks, Wien Ticket partnered with IT company, Schwaar, to migrate its core ticketing system to SLES for SAP Applications.
“In our effort to safeguard our reputation and protect sales revenues, we wanted the certainty that comes with a fully certified environment,” says Zelenka. “The SUSE solution was recommended by our software vendor SAP, and we are confident that choosing SLES for SAP Applications with 24/7 support was the right decision to minimize business risk.”
He continues: “Both Schwaar and SUSE did an excellent job of helping us finetune the system, and we were able to deploy the new platform very rapidly without any issues.”
In addition to high levels of performance and stability, Wien Ticket enjoys 24/7 priority support from SUSE as part of the solution. This ensures that Wien Ticket can get advice and technical support when needed, even on weekends and public holidays — typically high traffic timeslots as customers rush to book entertainment events in their free time.
The Results
By selecting SLES for SAP Applications as the operating system for its core application, Wien Ticket has gained a highly reliable and well-supported foundation for its ticketing services.
Taking advantage of built-in clustering technology, delivered by SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, Wien Ticket can ensure that its booking system and mobile applications run 24/7 — without interruption. High availability allows the company to guarantee a top-notch user experience, boosting both satisfaction and sales.
Since implementing SLES for SAP Applications, Wien Ticket has been able to achieve 100% uptime for its ticketing application.
“SLES for SAP Applications is an incredibly stable platform; it runs smoothly without issues and it gives us great peace of mind knowing that our applications will work, and customers can access our services at any time,” says Zelenka. “We want to offer an even wider range of events and sell greater volumes of tickets in the future, and we are confident that the reliable and scalable SUSE solution will allow us to keep performance levels high and grow with our requirements.”