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Ticketmaster chooses Red Hat Enterprise Linux and StrongMail Systems for reliable communication with customers

Ticketmaster is the world’s leading ticketing company, selling more than 98 million tickets and serving more than 9,000 venue, promoter, sports team, and event clients worldwide in 2004. Ticketmaster scheduled eight months to add high-performance email to its existing CRM solution. It was operational in one month with StrongMail and Red Hat Enterprise Linux providing them unprecedented speed, delivery and control.

The problem: email today

Despite the business benefits of email, the technology itself has lagged behind the current demands placed upon it. As Frank Addante, founder and CEO of StrongMail Systems, points out, “The business use of email is in the dark ages. Most companies are developing their email infrastructure on twenty-year-old technology.” (To put this in perspective, twenty years ago Microsoft® released Windows® 1.0.)

Businesses relying heavily on email as their primary method of communication are discovering unfortunate problems. “It’s very complex and costly to develop innovative applications on such old technology,” explains Addante. “And if you do manage it, the applications won’t scale with demand because the outdated technology simply can’t handle it.”

By far, spam is the number one problem facing companies that rely heavily on email to conduct business. The United Nations estimates that spam costs the global economy approximately $25 billion annually1. Companies waste most of this money on lost productivity and increasingly ineffective filtering solutions. The flip side of this problem is just as troubling: 19% of legitimate business email never gets delivered due to overly aggressive spam filters2.

The solution: StrongMail Systems backed by Red Hat Enterprise Linux

StrongMail Systems provides a solution to these problems. StrongMail has pioneered an innovative email application infrastructure, that offers businesses a solid foundation boasting 99.5% email deliverability to the inbox. “We’re in the business of providing business users 100% visability and control over their email operations,” says Rod Butters, VP of Marketing at StrongMail.

StrongMail, founded in 2002, chose to build their solution on Linux because they wanted to offer openness, flexibility, and a minimal total cost of ownership to their customers. “Our mission is to make email as easy as dial tone,” says Addante. “It’s just not very reliable today, but the phone is, right? You pick up the phone and it just works. With that in mind, there are two critical aspects. One is making sure that our platform is open and easy to use, and the second is making sure that it’s high performance and rock-solid. So we have to use a platform that’s just as rock-solid and easy to use.”

StrongMail selects Red Hat after extensively testing other Linux platforms.

StrongMail tested and supported several Linux distributions–including Red Hat Linux 7.x–but ultimately selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as their platform of choice. Becoming a Red Hat Ready partner was a logical and necessary step.

According to Butters, “The migration from Red Hat Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux was very simple for us, primarily because of the flexibility inherent in Linux, but also because there was obviously a lot of care and focus on offering people a smooth migration to this platform.

“We see tremendous benefit in being on a platform that’s had over 700 commercial vendors provide insight, recommendations, and feedback on the right features and fixes” Butters continues. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the perfect combination of open source flexibility being commercially hardened. It’s positive for us and it’s positive for our customers.” Ticketmaster looks to StrongMail and Red Hat

Ticketmaster operates one of the largest e-Commerce sites on the Internet. When the company developed its new e-mail-based marketing product, a reliable, robust delivery engine was critical to meet the ever-increasing business demands of its clients.

Ticketmaster’s success

“Our mission is to provide our clients with the best systems, products, and services to sell tickets” explains Sean Moriarty, Chief Operations Officer at Ticketmaster, “And for consumers, our goal is to offer an easy and convenient experience throughout the entire purchasing process–all the way through to the scanning of their ticket as they enter the venue.”

For Ticketmaster and its clients, email is one of the most effective ways to get the right message to the right consumer at the right time–which is crucial for effectively marketing event ticket sales. “We sell a tremendous number of tickets every day on behalf of our clients. Every transaction and every consumer interaction must be handled efficiently and effectively. Our clients rely on us for the responsibility of providing first rate ticketing services to their customers,” Moriarty says

Ticketmaster introduced its email marketing tool for clients last year. StrongMail serves as the email generation and delivery engine with Red Hat Enterprise Linux serving as the platform solution. The reliable, robust email system meets clients’ ever-increasing business demands and has been integral to Ticketmaste’s success with its email marketing product.

“It is critical that we enable our clients with the ability to interact well with consumers who are interested in the latest news about the events they care about” Moriarty says. “StrongMail helps us accomplish that objective”

Results for Ticketmaster

Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and StrongMail Enterprise as its foundation, Ticketmaster was able to build and launch its new email marketing application three months sooner than anticipated. Since this solution required only one engineering resource, Ticketmaster also significantly reduced its project costs.

“Before our decision to deploy StrongMail, we considered developing this new application using custom code. We realized that would require more time spent developing the foundation than the application itself,” said Brian Pike, VP for CRM at Ticketmaster

With StrongMail’s easy-to-use SOAP/XML API and its anti-spam compliance features, Ticketmaster’s email marketing product has become far more efficient, with delivery rates growing steadily.

“The StrongMail solution provides an agile foundation, scalable to our needs, which allows Ticketmaster to focus on adding value to its existing applications. By doing so, Ticketmaster is constantly enhancing its reputation as a service provider on behalf of its clients, a role the company takes very seriously,” adds Moriarty

“We provide our clients with the best systems, products, and services to facilitate sales and we are strongly committed to utilizing the best technology solutions whether building internally or through strategic alliances with communities of development that share our mandate of excellence. The performance, reliability, and economic benefits of Linux, Red Hat, and StrongMail combined with their respective communities of supporting talent, present the best technology solution for our e-mail marketing product.”

• http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=11315&Cr=internet&Cr1=
• http://atlantaima.org/events/index.cfm?EventID=18