By using AWS Service Catalog, our business can drive the technology rather than have technology drive our business.
TEG—a ticketing, live entertainment, and data analytics business headquartered in Sydney, Australia—has been in business for 40 years and was used to managing technology internally. As technology evolved, however, that became less feasible. “Five years ago, we moved away from using a hosted data center to the public cloud,” says Tane Oakes, enterprise architect for TEG. This effort prompted the company’s first engagements with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
TEG is the parent company of Ticketek, the largest ticketing business in Asia Pacific, issuing 28 million tickets each year. When Ticketek opens event ticket sales, website traffic bursts may involve up to 500,000 people trying to access a site in a matter of minutes. A hosted data center requires infrastructure with capacity to manage the maximum number of ticket buyers around the clock, even if traffic bursts only occur once a day for 15 to 30 minutes. Maintaining these complex environments presented a challenge to TEG. As it embarked on expansion plans in Asian markets, the business faced a choice: set up monolithic data centers that could be provisioned and deprovisioned quickly or find a more nimble technology solution.
“We reached out to Amazon to see if they could help us operate better. They showed us the value of AWS partners and how they could help us achieve our business goals faster,” explains Oakes. The entertainment business is events-driven. TEG needed a partner that understood that business model and knew improvements would involve many small changes made quickly. Deloitte Australia was that partner.
“The Deloitte Australia consulting practice helps customers on their end-to-end technology journey,” says Zack Levy, partner at Deloitte Australia, an Advanced Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN). “TEG chose us because we understood their need for agility, and we used an outcome-driven model,” Levy says. Deloitte offered TEG cost-effective ways to enable the business to meet variable demand and solutions that allowed TEG staff to focus on serving customers.
When tickets go on sale, TEG must ensure people can access its website and purchase tickets quickly. Because traffic is linked to specific events and sales dates, the company knows exactly when spikes will occur. The company’s business units control events—as opposed to the technology team—so it made sense to give control of event-driven tasks to business unit owners and make those tasks self-service. The Deloitte team worked with TEG to develop a solution that took advantage of AWS Service Catalog. AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services approved for use on AWS. Organizations can centrally manage requested services, achieve consistent governance, and meet compliance requirements, while enabling users to quickly deploy only approved IT services.
Deloitte also recommended that TEG use third-party products from AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors. AWS Marketplace makes it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS. In partnership with Deloitte, TEG used third-party products, AWS native services, and Deloitte’s intellectual property to develop an end-to-end solution that would both meet its requirements and be managed and deployed using AWS Service Catalog. With this solution, what was once considered a complex configuration and deployment, became a single-click, fully automated process. Now TEG could quickly set up secure, compliant, resilient, and highly available infrastructure any time a business unit required it. The solution gave TEG the visibility it needed to estimate the projected costs of each environment deployment.
The team relied on AWS CloudFormation templates for the infrastructure-as-code scripting language. It also used AWS Service Catalog for managing product versions, security, governance, and compliance. AWS CloudFormation templates define AWS resources required in the solution, relationships between resources, and parameters that end users can provide to configure security groups, create key pairs, and perform other customizations. AWS Service Catalog provides guardrails to ensure deployments are performed consistently and securely by authorized personnel. TEG business units can procure environments just in time for each event and sell up to 10,000 event tickets per minute. The infrastructure shuts down automatically when the event is over.
“By using AWS Service Catalog, our business can drive the technology rather than have technology drive our business,” says Oakes. The self-service capability provided by AWS Service Catalog enabled the TEG IT team to function as service provider to internal stakeholders. This shift away from day-to-day maintenance freed the team to focus on other business goals, such as point-of-sale systems inside venues, networking within other countries and their venues, promotions, and data analysis. “Leveraging AWS Service Catalog, we moved tasks that should be business-driven into the hands of business users,” says Oakes. “We removed IT from those tasks and can now concentrate on other goals.”
The partnership with Deloitte is ongoing, with a dedicated team member onsite at TEG. Oakes says, “Our development would not have moved as fast without engaging Deloitte as our partner. TEG now works with partners who are the best in the world at what they do. That keeps us focused on what we do best.”
Deloitte Australia provides technology consulting services to customers. As an APN Advanced Consulting Partner, Deloitte Australia helps customers turn complex business issues into opportunities for growth and helps organizations transform in the digital era
To learn more, visit AWS Service Catalog and AWS Marketplace.