Hearts Soccer comes South of the Scottish border
Scottish Premier League Football Club Heart of Midlothian, has signed a long-term IT outsourcing contract with ticketing specialist Seatbooker.
The contract involves the complete outsourcing of the club’s ticketing and retail merchandising systems to Seatbooker’s managed service. The ASP Service includes the provision of all the central transaction and processing systems needed to run the club’s ticketing and retail services, including high speed links to the banks for credit card authorisation.
By outsourcing essential services such as ticketing, Hearts will no longer need to invest in, nor be responsible for maintaining the IT infrastructure needed to operate mission critical services. As part of the Managed Service, the club will benefit from a service dedicated to providing ticket management services, database and credit card authorisation applications with improved resilience and better redundancy. From March 2003, the club will connect to Seatbooker’s data centre where every ticket and merchandise transaction will be processed using Seatbooker’s significant investment in IT infrastructure.
Seatbooker provide their e-commerce services as an integral part of their Managed Service and in addition to supplying specialist hardware and software, the Managed Service will enable the club to sell tickets on the Internet at the level of individual seats all from a single database of ticket availability. The club will also receive the following as part of the contract:
- Credit card authorisation directly to the authorising bank in five seconds using multiple authorisation routes for added contingency
- A single set of administration tools for both the box-office and the Internet
- Management of data back-up
- Technical support from 6:00am to midnight, all year round
- Internet ticketing for both match day and season tickets, and Internet bandwidth capable of handling large peaks in demand
- Software upgrades provided and installed without club intervention
- Complete control over when fixtures are made available
Other users of Seatbooker’s Managed Services include clubs such as Tottenham Hotspur setting ticket and e-commerce records, and smaller clubs like Blackpool United and Southend United Football Clubs.
Spurs also are able to limit sales to members and season ticket holders for the high demand games, although others can still see which seats are available. This prevents the common need of outsourcing peak demands to traditional ticketing agencies where the full benefits of e-commerce are lost and the customer identification opportunities forfeited.
Seatbooker provide their e-commerce services as an integral part of their Managed Service, where clients rent hardware, software and other services, with Seatbooker providing all the processing, support and backup facilities. Other users of the integrated ticketing systems include clubs such as NEC Harlequins Rugby Club and some not so big, such as Southend United Football Club.