Can cloud computing catapult NZ onto a global stage?

It opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Say TicketDirect needs or wants to sell half a million tickets around the world to an Olympic Games. The company knows when the selling period of heavy demand will be, which is an advantage, says Davey. “Then we can spark up as we need and partition our data on as many Azure SQL servers as we need and we are rockin’ and rollin’ from there.”

TicketDirect has grabbed 45% of all professional ticketed events in New Zealand and a substantial foothold in Australia through turning the ticketing model on its head. The company’s business model is to provide software directly to venues who provide their own ticketing services and choose their own prices while using TicketDirect’s centralised ticketing website and common marketing brand. Davey reckons it is commonsense.

“We’ve given them a huge element of control and the ability to set their own prices, keep more money in their back pockets and more jobs in their local communities. We’ve proved how strong the model is and how well it works. What we’re going to do with the whole cloud side of things is take the business model global.”

It is a punt, says Davey. Taking the risk as an early adopter is always perilous, but the potential reward by gaining first-mover advantage is massive.

In a sense, none of this is new. “What all the cloud platforms are about is taking many of the application architectures developed over the past 10 to 15 years, building high-scale internet applications and putting those into a form that can be bottled and sold by the hour,” says Auld. “How else would we end up with Amazon being the emergent leader in cloud computing? Someone from Amazon woke up one morning and said, ‘we are a really big book store and we do a good job of running high-scale data centres so why don’t we put it in a bottle and sell it?”

“We’ve come a long way but the basic notion that there could be a specialist provider with the expertise and scale and capability to do it at lower cost than you could do it yourself and make reasonably sophisticated capabilities available to quite small companies is exactly the same,” says Lawrie.

“The interesting thing is the way in which we execute around this, and the internet and virtualisation capabilities and the scalability we can get out of today’s platform technology have really changed the dynamics about how you deliver that.”

Cisco, which last year announced a joint cloud venture with VMware and EMC, has been targeting larger companies and cloud providers, says Lawrie, who thinks there is a high level of interest but also a degree of caution.

“The industry does an unfortunate thing to itself in creating huge amounts of hype and expectation around a capability and then, more often than not, underdelivering. It’s unfortunate that the cloud has risen so dramatically because fundamentally it is actually a very viable notion.”

Remove location from the business discussion and it opens up pretty interesting possibilities for New Zealand companies,
he says.

“One of the implications of the cloud is that it can catapult New Zealand on to a global stage. The fundamental principle of the cloud is that it is completely independent of location. It doesn’t matter whether you are delivering or accessing the service.”

For TicketDirect, the cloud raises the bar dramatically, says Davey. “And there is no way we could afford the resources to do it in a conventional manner. We are able to go from the 10 servers we’ve got to 10,000 servers. You can specify that many. A small company like us can’t afford that kind of infrastructure to have it sitting around idle 99% of the time.”