While Sydney Opera House has excelled over the years in bringing a hugely diverse range of artists and performances to its stages, its online ticketing service has fared less well. The centre launched its first website and began selling tickets online in 2000. Hosting of the site was outsourced to a third party and ran smoothly for a period. However with more and more patrons using the service, the system began to struggle.

“Customers wanted faster response times and access to the entire site at all times,” says Claire Swaffield, Director of Information Systems at Sydney Opera House.

”We were also keen to better service large events where people want to get online and buy the best tickets in the first 15 minutes of it going on sale.”

Sydney Opera House turned to its technology partner of 20 years, HP, for assistance, acquiring an HP BladeSystem to host its new website.

Where the new Tessitura software powering the website has enabled Sydney Opera House to bring its online ticketing system and ongoing customer relationship management into the present, the HP BladeSystem gives the centre the power and scalability to move with confidence into the future.

Importantly, HP c7000 small form enclosure with 10 HP ProLiant BL460c server blades has worked well at Sydney Opera House, where space is at a premium..

“We’re very mindful of the power and cooling requirements in our data centre," says Claire.

"The HP BladeSystem provides a lot of power and scalability in a very small package, and we’ve seen a dramatic reduction in the cost of running the technology side of our business.”

The HP Solution also includes tools like HP Onboard Administrator and HP Integrated Lights Out 2 (iLO 2), enabling Opera House IS staff to remotely manage the centre's systems from any location with Internet access. Sydney Opera House also benefits from an HP StorageWorks 6000 Enterprise Virtual Array, that provides centralised storage, and an HP StorageWorks MSL6000 tape library and HP Data Protector software which combine to allow the centralised backup of precious data.

But perhaps the most impressive feature of the HP BladeSystem is the speed with which Sydney Opera House can now deploy new systems to enhance the service to patrons.

Using the powerful capabilities of the HP BladeSystem, Sydney Opera House decided to boost its hardware investments and purchased VMware virtualisation software through HP. The software provides the ability to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the same time, giving it maximum use of its hardware.

“Before the virtual environment, it could take two or more days to deploy a new server," says Claire.

"Now, we can push out an image and deploy a machine with the base operating system in less than two hours.”

That's an 87 percent increase in deployment speed.

Since pairing the VMware software with the HP BladeSystem, the Opera House has virtualised its domain controllers, print servers and BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Its aim down the track is to virtualise any machine that does not require high levels of throughput.

The most noticeable and, undoubtedly, important benefit of the software and hardware implementation, however, has been the improvement in the overall customer experience. sydneyoperahouse.com is now able to accommodate 20 times the previous amount of traffic moving through the site. With the Tessitura software providing enhanced capabilities, the Opera House can track customer activity on the site and use the information to invite patrons back for future events.

“It has completely changed the way we interact with our customers," says Claire.

"Because Tessitura is a fully integrated solution with our website, it has allowed us to triple the size of our customer database in just two years, which is a great resource for marketing the amazing performing arts events at Sydney Opera House.”

The enduring and fruitful partnership between Sydney Opera House and HP is the product of a unique understanding, one that encompasses planning, commercial and technological needs and a level of creative empathy that enables both parties to collaborate for the future.

“HP goes the extra mile to really understand our strategic direction and they help us translate those business requirements into the technology that will deliver them,” says Claire.

“The HP team here in Sydney takes a real interest in Sydney Opera House.”