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Solutions

Online Ticket Sales

The Internet is increasingly becoming the medium of choice for doing business for both consumers and firms alike. Attracted by the low cost per transaction and escape from the overhead of call centres, businesses are moving nearly all customer contact through the web. Similarly, consumers are selecting the web for speed and convenience. Ticket sales for the annual Glastonbury festival is no exception.

Glastonbury is the premier outdoor music and arts festival in Britain with a history spanning over 30 years. The Glastonbury Festival occurs once a year and attracts some of the most famous musicians in the world. It is no wonder that when tickets are available they are in high demand.

Challenge

In the past, ticket sales for the festival were handled via telephone and by approved physical ticketing vendors. However, in recent years, organisers have seen an increasing demand for tickets via the Internet. Online ticketing has become so popular in fact, that in 2004 the ticketing web site couldn't cope with the deluge of traffic and effectively "locked out" would-be customers.

This resulted in a huge increase in contact centre traffic, as prospective customers rushed to somehow complete their transactions. The call centre soon became overwhelmed, unable to keep up with the volume or handle the customer complaints regarding the site performance. The aftermath was predictable, customers fumed and the press hammered both the ticketing agency and festival organisers for their poor planning.

2005 was to be quite different however, with the ticketing agency calling upon some of the most talented IT security minds in the UK, to ensure that the 2004 disaster wasn't repeated.

Solution

See, the UK's largest ticketing company, which sells Glastonbury tickets on behalf of Aloud.com, turned to Majestic Interactive to ensure the success of this year's online ticket sales. Majestic designed and built a unique solution that would effectively deal with the anticipated demand and provide an efficient customer experience for hopeful ticket buyers.

However, just days before the tickets were due to go on sale Majestic became aware of a potential threat from a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. Such "Flash Traffic" incidents are becoming increasingly commonplace, occurring whenever there is a news item, business offering, or, as is the case with the annual Glastonbury Festival a limited opportunity to purchase tickets.

This type of incident would have allowed customers clicking on the link to trigger a device that simultaneously opened multiple sessions, resubmitting the request over and over again, until a complete response was received. This would increase the likelihood of access to the ticket site and a successful purchase but potentially lock up or crash the web servers. In response to this threat, Majestic turned to security specialists Webscreen Technology for help.

Having seen dozens of customers through DoS attacks and Flash Traffic incidents, Webscreen Technology was well suited to assist in making sure that Glastonbury's 2005 ticket sale was as uneventful as possible.

Webscreen installed a WS-100 which is an inline network appliance designed to mitigate DDOS attacks with the use of its unique heuristic algorithm (CHARM). Boxing Orange then monitored the device in real-time 24/7 to ensure that any attack or flash flood would be mitigated before it started to affect the performance of the site.

Jeremy Gidlow, Operations Manager, Majestic Interactive Ltd comments: "We called on Webscreen to help us out in the eleventh hour and were impressed with the responsiveness of the team and the effectiveness of the solution at such short notice."

Results

Tickets for Glastonbury sold out in record time when they went on sale on April 3 at 9am. In the two hours that it took to sell the tickets, over £13million worth of transactions went through a system that took approximately 21million hits (measured by site analytics tool IIS Logs).

Webscreen consultants observed the traffic spike as it occurred with the inbound data rate rocketing to over 27 times it's normal peak. Yet the service remained available and readily accessible.

In employing the Webscreen Network Integrity Appliance, the hosting providers and by extension the ticketing agency placed a device in-line to prevent a network outage. When Flash Traffic incidents occurred, Webscreen's unique technology helped to produce an orderly queue, making sure that network resources were not overwhelmed by the sudden flood of traffic.

Within three hours the event was largely over and traffic patterns returned to their normal ranges. The online ticket sale was lauded as a success by both the promoters and the ticketing agency.

Rob Wilmshurst, Chief Operating Officer for See said, "See were committed to ensuring the success of Glastonbury 2005.The innovative solution designed, built and run by Majestic enabled us to provide an exceptional user experience to those customers wishing to purchase tickets online."

Gidlow concludes: "The physical security surrounding such a high profile event is phenomenal and with Boxing Orange and Webscreen this has now been extended to the online ticket sales as well with great success."