Tickets.com's Doug Lyons Talks Strategy

Venues Today

LONG BEACH, CALIF. — The employees of Tickets.com don’t need 20 million reasons to spend a few bucks on a party. Last week, they found just one reason to throw a swanky soiree at the Grand Hyatt in Long Beach, Calif. — to celebrate the 20 million smackers they just spent to develop ProVenue.

About 90 people converged on Tickets.com’s Executive Summit Tuesday night. On display was the company’s new ProVenue portfolio, a new ticketing application designed to offer venues and box offices a fully customizable ticketing product.

Major League Baseball has yet to switch over to the new platform, although Tickets.com Business Development VP Steve Demots said he expected a handful of teams to be live by Opening Day 2010. Current users include the Hartman Arena in Wichita, Kan.; the Palladium in Hollywood, Calif., and the Seattle Theater Group. The 2010 Vancouver Olympics is also using ProVenue.

As for the future, the next possible market could be regional ticketing companies, said Doug Lyons, director of Sales and Engineering for Tickets.com. The former Paciolan executive (Demots is also from Paciolan) believes many ticketing companies are looking at new systems now that their Paciolan-powered programs are essentially operated by Ticketmaster. Venues Today sat down with Lyons to discuss ProVenues and how Tickets.com hopes to change the business.

Venues Today: What is the story of ProVenue?
Doug Lyons: In the past, there have been companies to compete with the Ticketmaster style. You buy the software, you put it on a server in your building and you sell tickets. The difference for ProVenue is that you get your own version of the software with your own database, but you also get full customization. You get to control all of the fees and can add-on services. Are you interested in stored value? We can recommend our partner Givex, or you can use your own. It’s all about creating a product that’s a good foundation with lots of functionality for the ticketing piece, and then be available to add our recommended services, or do it your own way.


VT: It sounds similar to the Paciolan-model. One of the problems they faced with their legacy software was that there were so many versions in existence that IT became very difficult. How do you avoid that?
DL: ProVenue is what other industries have been doing for the last five-to-10 years. They’ve been building these data centers that host technology and are designed to have shared resources, but still have control and are secure.

VT: You’ve also made some changes to the secondary model, creating a platform that allows the venues to determine how much control or participation they want to have over ticket resales. How are venues utilizing this technology?
DL: The Olympics is a good example. The 2010 Winter Olympics (in Vancouver, B.C.) wanted to offer people the ability to resell tickets through the Olympics website. They can control that and put rules around it, just like Flash Seats does with their product. We can also work with other secondary providers, like StubHub, that can share data. You can also share in the revenue, but that’s between you and StubHub.

VT: What’s your sales strategy?
DL: Right now, we’re not selling as much as we are getting input and feedback. We’re putting the finishes on the product. Major League Baseball was a big priority for us because they are our owners. We’ll put a bunch of teams on at the end of the season.

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