Ticketing System

Our client is a leading ticketing system provider. It has 1000+ ticketing offices in big cities.

The company provides ticket sales and access control services for theatre, cinema, concert, sport, musical and other entertainment events. The client’s software is a client-server solution that manages all processes in the ticketing life cycle. The company sells tickets in its own ticketing offices and in other points of sale, through the website and through partner networks.

When we started cooperation with the customer, there were a few immediate challenges:

• The customer wanted to grow the business by selling tickets to other providers. Usually, a static quota is reserved for the customer, but in case of a long-term relationship it could be done online via a gateway to the provider’s software.
• The system missed support of e-tickets.
• The system stored massive amounts of data, and reporting over the data was slow.
• Installation and upgrade of the system required a manual process which took hours and was very error-prone.

To integrate with the third-party ticket providers, we  developed a number of network gateways to theatres, cinemas, stadiums and other entertainment venues and event providers, such as major theatres and stadiums.

Usually, the development of a network gateway with a third-party ticket system was an end-to-end project for Software Country's team. Such project consisted of the following phases:

• negotiations with the ticket provider
• creating test environments on both sides
• revisions and reworks of public API on both sides
• development and testing
• deployment to a live environment.

Our team also developed the e-ticket functionality. When an e-ticket is issued, the system generates a unique barcode, puts it into a PDF file together with all the other information and sends it to the client. The client can print it on paper or just show the ticket barcode on a smartphone when entering the event. The system supports all popular barcode standards.

To make the reports faster, we tuned SQL queries and applied multithreading approach; by this way, we significantly improved the performance of the system.

System installation and upgrade was improved by creation of a Debian package that can install or upgrade the system with one command.

The customer acquired new partners, thus the ticket sales grew. With e-tickets, the customers no longer needed to visit ticket offices.

Business and financial managers now could get system reports much faster. The process of installing or updating the system became almost automatic.