Sydney - 12 Sep 2017: Village Roadshow Limited (ASX: VRL), a leading Australian entertainment company, has selected IBM Cloud (NYSE: IBM) to host its business infrastructure, providing scale and speed to support a premium entertainment experience for customers. The IBM Cloud provides the platform for key operations spanning the diverse needs of Village Roadshow’s four key business divisions - Cinema Exhibition, Theme Parks, Film Distribution and Marketing Solutions.  Each division of Village Roadshow must be ready to respond quickly to seasonal or promotional peaks and create new entertainment experiences for customers. For example, the company is required to quickly scale for an average 40 percent increase in ticket sales during school holidays and up to 100 percent uplift in sales over Christmas.

 

Village Roadshow recognised that modern, IBM Cloud technology provides the reliable, security-rich and scalable platform they need to help each division respond to their dynamic business environments. Furthermore, the IBM Cloud provides the speed and flexibility needed to build innovative new digital experiences, adapting quickly to constant change in customer preferences and offer more personalised customer experience across digital channels. Village Roadshow runs a hybrid cloud, with the IBM Cloud used for ticketing and payments systems.

“A key challenge for us is to interact with our customers in ways they want to engage, in both physical and digital environments. With four very diverse businesses, we need the tools capable of managing a variety of demands. IBM provides us with the flexibility to adapt to new opportunities. For example, we recently reduced the timeframe to provision additional capacity, which was required to migrate a core system, from an average of four to six weeks down to two days,” said Geoff Spicer, Group General Manager, Technology and Services for Village Roadshow.

Spicer added, “Ability to scale for promotions was key for the recent “Baby Driver” campaign. Village Roadshow invited customers to attend a Q&A session at the Jam Factory with the director and actors from the movie, prior to the screening.  The promotion saw an instant 300 percent plus increase of online ticket sales compared to a normal session, in response to the electronic direct marketing campaign.”

“From the ticketing experience to customer loyalty programmes to asset management, there is a vast amount of highly valuable and industry-specific business data that enterprises must be able to leverage,” said Andrew Kupetz, chief technology officer, Hybrid Cloud, IBM. “The IBM Cloud is architected to connect, protect and draw insight from all kinds of data wherever it is – this is the power of hybrid cloud.”

For more information on IBM Cloud, visit: http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/