The Pulsant hosted Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) website has seen a surge in tickets sales for this year’s renowned event since the opening of the 2015 box office.
Pulsant supplies the enterprise cloud infrastructure to support the site with an architecture that incorporates hardware-based load balancing, caching, application servers and database servers. Pulsant previously facilitated a move from a private cloud to enterprise cloud solution when the festival’s website and externally hosted ticketing site were upgraded. Enterprise Cloud is more comprehensive and offers greater flexibility and improved performance by changing the architecture and adding more resource to the platform.
Chris Shields, regional sales director, Pulsant said: “We have worked with the Edinburgh International Festival for the last eight years and throughout that time they have seen a massive shift from internet access being a tool, to it being absolutely business critical. We are delighted to have played a supporting role in their record number of online bookings and wish the team every success at this year’s event.”
The EIF website experiences three main peaks during the year – the first during the launch of its programme, the second when tickets are made available for purchase, and the third when the festival actually begins.
Nicola Kenny, digital marketing manager, Edinburgh International Festival said: “With unprecedented numbers of visitors booking online this year, the constant availability of the website is key, as is the connectivity Pulsant provides between the website and the externally hosted ticketing system. Since tickets went on sale at the end of March, the buying process has gone very smoothly even during the busiest, peak periods.”
This year's event runs from 7 until 31 August and will welcome more than 2,300 participants from 39 countries. Among the hottest tickets are Ivo van Hove's production of Sophocles' Antigone, starring French actress Juliette Binoche, the Citizens Theatre's production of Alistair Gray's seminal novel Lanark, the Komische Oper and 1927 theatre company's production of The Magic Flute and Budapest Festival Orchestra's The Marriage of Figaro.
