Paciolan Modernizes MV Reporting with Entrinsik Informer

Oct 10, 2007 - Paciolan Systems is one of the largest ticketing providers in the United States. It provides private label ticketing systems that support most of the large college athletic programs as well as many professional sports teams. By using Paciolan systems, teams and athletic programs do their own ticketing. "Many of the large programs just sell out, so rather than using Ticketmaster and paying those fees, they keep that," said David Raber, chief product and technology officer. "We provide the same application - a Web site with ticketing - but we charge a flat fee for the service and they set the fees. The software is similar to Ticketmaster but the business model is completely different."

For example, the Portland Trailblazers are very focused on knowing who their fans are and what they do. They would not want to use Ticketmaster, Raber said, because "then their customer base would be Ticketmaster customers. With us, even though we provide the software and servers, they own the database and any follow up marketing will be done by them and not Ticketmaster. The venue is in charge and can set whatever fees and policies they want.

The technical challenge is managing the site when individual game tickets go on sale. For example, when the New York Mets home game tickets go on sale in February, suddenly a lot of tickets become available and demand spikes. "We are expected to produce a thousand tickets a minute for Web orders. After the playoffs, nothing happens for the winter months. It is very seasonal. We have to size our servers and capability around feast and famine days," said Raber. "When a concert goes on sale, it is huge and then it is nothing."

The company was established 27 years ago with the University of Southern California as the first customer. Initially, each customer had a dedicated Microdata computer. Currently, Paciolan has a data center with IBM RS6000 servers with virtual partitions running the IBM UniVerse MultiValue database. Capacity and resources can be shifted to the needed venue. "Fortunately IBM and UniVerse have been a good environment to do that," said Raber, who is a veteran of the MultiValue community.

Indeed, MultiValue database technology has served the company well. Paciolan's tagline is "Your tickets, your way" and the company is known for its flexibility. "It is hard to convert off one of our systems because it is so flexible," Raber said. For example, the sites allow for unlimited numbers of telephone numbers in whatever way the customer has decided. "MultiValue has led us to a remarkable degree of flexibility," he said.

The market that Paciolan serves is undergoing a huge transformation. The classic 40-city concert tour is dwindling. "We have to make adjustments," Raber said. Fan clubs and pre-sales are more important. But fan clubs can only buy a certain amount of tickets. Their access is controlled through single-use passwords. Along the same lines, acts are building alliances with players like American Express, in which premium seats are set aside.

Although Paciolan has been able to generate reports, the capability had not been modernized. "We have dictionaries that are 27 years old so when the report tool presented the dictionary and asked which attributes were wanted, it was an overwhelming question," said Raber.

Paciolan thought about cleaning up the existing report utility and building a Web interface for it. Raber also evaluated three alternative solutions over a five- month period. The company selected Entrinsik Informer, a popular Web-reporting tool that provides easy interactive reporting from very complex database structures. Informer is built on IBM's U2 family of MultiValue relational databases and preserves the power of their inherent three dimensional data structures while avoiding the overhead of data translation. "It had everything in our spec and then some, so that made it an easy choice," Raber said. Within several days, Paciolan was demonstrating the capability to its customers.

Entrinsik pulls data right from the transactional database to generate reports. Moreover, Entrinsik allowed Raber to identify the meaningful subset of the files and dictionary entries that are relevant to reporting. "It simplified the whole reporting process," he said.And that has been a big plus.

Entrinsik Informer has been integrated at 20 sites including the University of Oklahoma. While many of Paciolan's customers have very successful programs, as competition for entertainment dollars continues to heat up, athletic programs have to operate on a more sophisticated business basis and understand where the fans come from; how much they spend; when and how they bought their tickets; and how they became ticket holders. Entrinsik Informer allows them to efficiently run reports to address questions like those.

From Paciolan's perspective, integrating modern reporting capability has been an important addition. "If you are an expert Paciolan user and you don't mind character- based reports you are fine. But we are finding that there is much more turnover and more people who are not experts in the system," Raber said. Having a Web- based front end to get data out of the system and looking at Web-based reports is much more appealing to end- users. And working with Entrinsik has been a very positive experience, Raber added. "You could not ask for better customer service."

Since 1984, Entrinsik Inc. has been developing, implementing, and supporting database solutions that enable organizations to maximize performance and improve bottom lines by tracking, understanding, and managing information.  With tens of thousands of users across various industries, Entrinsik's Informer Web Reporting software delivers true real-time access to multiple data sources simply and easily using a built-in Web-based query engine. Informer leverages a powerful metadata model that creates consistency among disparate data descriptions and structures to provide a single point of secured information access for ad hoc reporting, report customization and analysis.  

Forget about data silo constraints. Informer extends self-service operational reporting and analysis capabilities to both technical and business users who can now quickly and easily perform their own analyses on the fly in faster more powerful ways than ever before. 

Entrinsik's SEMtek ERP software now drives many of the nation's largest professional and continuing education profit centers.

To learn more or for information about our FREE 30day trial of Informer, visit www.entrinsik.com or call 888-703-0016 today.