Application traffic management (ATM) vendor Zeus Technology has signed a deal with See Tickets to help the ticket seller cope with spikes in web traffic.
See Tickets currently makes about 85% of its sales online but its previous traffic management platform could not cope with extreme spikes in traffic, such as when short-notice promotion tickets went on sales and during the music festival season.
“For example, See Tickets powers the website for Glastonbury and as ticket sales for the event continue to grow in popularity, it was clear that this was a challenge we needed to address,” said Matt Relf, IT manager at See Tickets.
The firm deployed the Zeus Traffic Manager, an application that can load-balance requests across the application infrastructure. As well as increasing website uptime the application can also increase the number of transactions per second that the infrastructure can handle.
Zeus Traffic Manager also provides reporting capabilities, enabling See Tickets to monitor and review traffic patterns and plan for traffic peaks.
See Tickets has also improved the security of its site as well as the third-party sites it supports, by implementing the Zeus Application Firewall Module. This watches for threats aimed at the web server and helps online retailers to comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), a regulation that governs how organisations process, transmit or store credit card information.
The ATM platform has improved the reliability of the See Tickets website, said Relf, with 100% uptime since the software was implemented.
See Tickets is one of the largest ticket sellers in Europe, with over 40 million unit sales per year. It handles online sales for companies such as SJM Concerts, the BBC, Stage Entertainment and Really Useful Theatres as well as events such as the Glastonbury music festival and the 2010 Ryder Cup.
Zeus powers the website of customers such as BT, Comic Relief, Domino’s Pizza, Virgin Media and Play.com.
