Village Roadshow deployed IBM Cloud to host its business infrastructure to help manage its seasonal and promotion peak periods.
The platform will cover four business divisions, including cinema exhibition, theme parks film distribution and marketing solutions.
According to the entertainment company, each division must quickly respond to seasonal or promotional peaks for example, during school holidays where it experiences a 40 per cent increase in ticket sales and up to 100 per cent during the Christmas period.
Village Roadshow currently runs a hybrid cloud, with IBM Cloud used for ticketing and payments systems.
Village Roadshow has already moved a few of its systems to the Cloud. In August, it closed its co-located data centre and with help from IT specialist BNW, it transitioned its SAP systems to Microsoft Azure.
“A key challenge for us is to interact with our customers in ways they want to engage, in both physical and digital environments," Village Roadshow group general manager for technology and services, Geoff Spicer, said. "With four very diverse businesses, we need the tools capable of managing a variety of demands.
“IBM provides us with the flexibility to adapt to new opportunities. For example, we recently reduced the time frame to provision additional capacity, which was required to migrate a core system, from an average of four to six weeks down to two days," he said.
Another example Spicer highlighted was the ability to scale for promotions. It recently ran a ‘Baby Driver’ campaign where customers were invited to a Q&A session with the director and actors prior to movie’s screening. This led to a 300 per cent increase in online ticket sales compared to a normal session.
IBM Hybrid Cloud CTO, Andrew Kupetz, pointed out that there was a vast amount of highly valuable and industry-specific business data that enterprise must be able to leverage from ticketing experience to customer loyalty programs and asset management.
On the back of increasing demand for its cloud services in Australia, IBM opened its fourth data centre in May, partnering with colocation provider, Digital Realty.
Recent figures released by Synergy Research Group indicated the four leading cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM and Google either maintained or grew their share of the global cloud infrastructure market.
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