ProVenue Exchange "Out of this World"!

By John Rizzi, SVP Client Services, Tickets.com

After John Walker’s keynote address on day 1 of our ProVenue Exchange conference on March 14, our VP of Marketing, Doug Lyons dove a little deeper into developments over the past year as well as changes to approach and product features in the coming year. This Included the re-commitment of focus on user experience in product design by showcasing examples of fresh, new approaches to ticketing interfaces and “next generation” Interactive Seat Maps. He reiterated the importance of APIs by showing the currently in development “Linebuster” iPad ticket selling application, which allows a mobile user to easily sell tickets from ProVenue with an easy-to-use tablet interface. Great stuff!



I then moderated for a tremendous set of panelists on the state of Loyalty programs that included participation from the Washington Nationals (MLB), The Seattle Sounders (MLS) and the San Diego Padres (MLB). It was very eye-opening to realize that while almost “expected” in many commercial situations, Loyalty in entertainment has yet to find its exact place and value proposition.



Doug then again appeared to host a session on emerging technologies, subtitled “What would Captain Kirk do?” To everyone’s surprise (and laughter) he entered dressed in a full Mr. Spock Star Trek outfit – wig, ears and all. This showed evidence of a new style from Tickets.com where our culture is starting to echo our approach to software: A Great Experience.

Those Were Good Times....

Mike Duffy, Director, Product Development, Tickets.com

Ask anyone that knew me in high school (and I mean anyone) if they thought that someday I would be a DJ and the General Manager of a radio station and they would laugh in your face.

I entered UC Irvine as a very shy nerdy kid quite unprepared for the college experience. I took the bold step of signing up to be a radio DJ at KUCI and after a few weeks of training I was on the air, terrified, but on the air. I have no idea how many people were really listening at the time but slowly I gained more confidence. My shows featured everything from soft jazz to punk to classical to folk music to spoken work to 30 minutes of a tuba playing one evolving note(it was college radio after all).

I eventually worked up to Training Director and even did color commentary and play-by-play for exciting Anteater basketball. This was the era of Kevin Magee and Scotty Brooks (current coach for the Oklahoma City Thunder in the NBA). Much like John Rizzi, I DJ’d dances and parties and yes, The Romantics were always a hit.

For two years I also had the pleasure of serving as General Manager and leading a finicky crew of over 100 volunteers running the station.

Those were good times….

Who Is John Rizzi?

Over the last couple of months the Tickets.com executive team have been regular contributors to the ProVenue® blog. Some of you are already familiar with the leadership team here, but alas - some of you are not. Over the next couple of weeks let us share with you some unknown facts about this dynamic group.

Today we take a closer look at John Rizzi, SVP Product Management & Strategy. John started his tenure at Tickets.com almost 3 years ago and has quickly made a name for himself in the industry.

John Rizzi: Things You Won't Get From My Resume or Bio:

What you can see on my resume is that I've been in Technology for more than 20 years, what you won't see on there is that my favorite Tech saying is "yak shaving": sadly something I'm sure most can relate to.

If you read my bio, you'll see I'm married with two young boys - what's not there is that my wife and I got married in Vegas… by Elvis. While I AM a fan of the king, I love my wife even more for allowing us to have such an…. errrr…. affordable wedding.

My bio mentions that I went to Cal Poly Pomona (in the 80's) but what it doesn't say is I was the "R" in S&R Sounds DJ's. Those of you old enough might remember that the song that got everyone on the dance floor at frat parties, keggers, and school dances was the Romantics "What I Like About You"…. Uh huh huh…. HEY!!

Tickets.com, Others Follow Google, Amazon in Opening Up

Opening up an internal resource to outside developers, a la Amazon Web Services and Force.com, isn't just for the big guys anymore.

Smaller organizations with systems that may be aimed at narrow markets are also deciding to open up their platforms to third-party developers. They may do so as a way to create a new revenue stream or to make their own offerings more attractive.

Tickets.com is one such company that has opened its platform to third parties. The company, a subsidiary of MLB.com, provides the back-end ticketing engine for some Major League Baseball teams.

About four years ago, Tickets.com set out to revamp its platform, which at the time was composed of incompatible legacy systems. It decided to build an entirely new platform with a service-oriented architecture and a Web-based front end, said John Rizzi, senior vice president of product management and strategy at Tickets.com.

The decision to open that platform up to third parties came about by chance. "Somewhat by accident, we came to this spot," he said.

As it began building the new platform, Tickets.com hired technology experts to help with the process. "It took us bringing in people from outside the ticketing industry who were much more technology-centric to understand that we had a lot more in this platform than just something more modern and cheaper," Rizzi said.

Tickets.com isn't making its APIs available to just anyone, though. "It's not like we're going to say, 'here's the API, go develop and have fun.' Our clients aren't asking for that," he said. "They are asking for more flexibility and options, and we want to give them that."

Some third-party companies have already started offering services to Tickets.com customers using the new platform, and others are in the works.

Ballena is offering a product, built on Tickets.com's system, that lets online shoppers see in 3D the view from the seat they are considering buying. StubHub, the official secondary ticketing provider of the MLB, is also using the new platform. Its offering is integrated with Tickets.com, which ensures the tickets offered on StubHub are valid.

Tickets.com is also working with Qcue and Digonex, which offer dynamic pricing tools. Qcue, for example, feeds data, including sales inventory provided by Tickets.com and other data about the team's record, the weather and the game's pitching matchup, into its algorithms to recommend that baseball teams adjust ticket prices.

Developers may pay for access to Tickets.com in different ways, depending on how they operate. "My intent is, yes, to profit from this," Rizzi said. Qcue pays a subscription to receive the data feed. Stubhub shares revenue.

Rizzi's advice to other companies thinking of opening up their offerings in a similar way is to carefully think about the revenue model. "That's huge, because in the end, we could wind up opening our system and having a great system and making all the third parties really wealthy, and not participating in that. We don't want to do that," Rizzi said. "We want them to prosper... but I think having a plan in terms of how to monetize it before you implement is pretty important."

He also suggested that it's important to think about how to support the third-party developers. "Supporting an ecosystem of third parties is a lot different from supporting a client who is the end user of the system," he noted. He recommends that other companies make sure to consider those kinds of structural and business components and factor them into their revenue models.

At a recent cloud computing conference, Rizzi said one central theme was making the cloud about more than cost savings.

That's what Tickets.com and some of the pioneers in offering infrastructure or platforms as a service have done. Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com are among companies that have opened up their internal resources so third parties can develop on them.

For complete article: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=3235305

Source: Nancy Gohring, PC Advisor

Tickets.com attacking Ticketmaster dominance with open cloud systems

Companies believes that partnerships will lead to industry innovation

By Jon Brodkin, Network World

There are few monopolies as total as the one enjoyed by Ticketmaster. When's the last time you purchased a ticket online without paying Ticketmaster's $10-plus "convenience fees"?

Ticketmaster has beat back every competitor's attempt to displace it from the top of the online ticketing industry, but John Rizzi, vice president of product management and strategy at Tickets.com, is hopeful that a partner ecosystem based on new cloud computing technologies can eat away at Ticketmaster's dominant market share.

Tech arguments: Public vs. Private cloud

In a speech at the Cloud Leadership Forum, a conference hosted by IDC and IDG Enterprise, Rizzi took a few shots at Ticketmaster while acknowledging his own company's struggles to compete.

Tickets.com began with the idea of connecting to many different ticketing systems, like an aggregator site, but the approach failed because it lacked a critical mass of tickets to sell.

"The dominant player in the industry far and away is Ticketmaster and they had no intention of letting us sell tickets online for them," Rizzi said. "They wanted to do it themselves."

With Ticketmaster, "anybody who's bought tickets online knows how ridiculous the fees are. You pay a convenience fee. You pay an order fee, you pay a fee to print the tickets at home. This is a very hard model to compete with and we've tried to compete with it, other companies have tried to compete with it, and it's not working."

Tickets.com went on an acquisition spree in the early 2000s, buying four or five other ticketing companies. Tickets.com now sells tickets for half of the teams in Major League Baseball, and is a subsidiary of MLB.com.

Rather than focusing mostly on customer-facing technology, Tickets.com is now trying to make headway by selling ticketing systems to sports teams and other organizations. Ticketmaster still controls ticket sales of the other baseball teams Tickets.com doesn't sell for, as well as many other professional sports teams. But Rizzi believes his company's approach of partnering with a variety of cloud vendors, using APIs to connect one service to another, will drive innovation in the industry.

For example, Tickets.com partners with Qcue to provide a dynamic pricing engine to teams such as the San Francisco Giants. With dynamic pricing, an algorithm takes into account pitching matchups, weather, the opponent, day of the week and market conditions to determine the optimal price for an event. While a team like the Boston Red Sox needs little help selling tickets, and can charge whatever it wants, this dynamic pricing model has helped the Giants increase sales, according to Rizzi.

In addition to Qcue, Tickets.com is embracing a variety of partners, including Salesforce.com, StubHub, Givex and FanSnap. Rizzi believes partnerships will help differentiate Tickets.com from Ticketmaster.

"We really believe the ecosystem is what's going to drive innovation and the adoption of our ticketing platform," Rizzi said. "We're not going to be able to out-Ticketmaster Ticketmaster [alone]. Ticketmaster's systems are closed. So are the other competitors in our marketplace."

Rizzi pledged to improve the ticket-buying experience for customers, which he said has evolved slowly. He acknowledged that Ticketmaster is starting to improve in certain areas, such as allowing limited ability to choose specific seats, but in general he claimed the Ticketmaster technology is antiquated.

"Ticketmaster has conditioned this market to ignore technology," Rizzi said. "Buying tickets online, the experience is awful. It's really antiquated, it's very old, it's not very flexible. We are coming at a time where the teams are starting to realize that they want to change, they don't want to be beholden to Ticketmaster anymore."

Extending Your Business Into the Cloud

Tickets.com isn't just considering how the cloud can augment its infrastructure - the company is becoming a cloud provider itself! By extending its rich ticket service capabilities into the cloud and creating an ecosystem for enhancement by a world of developers, Tickets.com is not only enriching its services and deepening customer ties, but attempting to move its business faster than traditional competitors. This eye-opening case study shows that the cloud isn't just about a new style of computing, but a whole new way to do business.

John Rizzi, Vice President of Product Management and Strategy, Tickets.com will be speaking at the upcoming Cloud Leadership Forum conference in Santa Clara, CA on June 15.

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