Cloudyn Case Studies
Ticketmaster: Moving to the Public Cloud,
Achieving Outstanding Reductions on
Cloud-Computing Costs with Cloudyn
Company: Ticketmaster
Headquarters: West Hollywood, CA
Employees: 6,678
Ticketmaster, a Live Nation
Entertainment company (NYSE:
LYV), is a global leader in live
entertainment: 530 million fans
attended live concerts, 37 countries,
25,500 events, 3,300 artists
Key Challenges:
• Move fully to the public cloud
while maintaining accountability,
IT efficiency, cost reductions, and
showbacks to product teams
• Enable comprehensive visibility
into cloud consumption and
operations
• Make more informed new product
decisions, including inventory and
price cuts
• Empower finance and IT with full
understanding of cloud efforts and
their impact on the business
Results:
With the help of Cloudyn,
Ticketmaster has seen individual
workloads optimized by 56-77%.
They have seen business metrics
such as budget variance and
inventory forecasting improved by
42-64%.
From a global view across all
products and accounts, Ticketmaster
has seen improved technical metrics
including workload optimization and
RI planning and purchasing change
from a trending increase in cost per
GB RAM of 4% month over month to
a 15% reduction.
The global market leader in ticketing, Ticketmaster, a Live Nation Entertainment
company, connects consumers across the globe to 12,000 clients delivering live
entertainment across multiple categories: music, sports, theater, the arts, and
family and special events. Its site, Ticketmaster.com, ranks among the world’s
top e-commerce sites, with 80 million unique visitors monthly.
The Challenge
Across the board, the company has a major initiative underway to build a datadriven culture. As part of this, it is optimizing its technology and gaining more
business intelligence to spot trends and make projections. The goal is to use
data in one source—the public cloud—in three main areas: inventory, costs, and
overlooked business opportunities.
“We wanted to have our cost and inventory questions answered,
and really optimize our technology to spur growth, efficiency,
and customer satisfaction,” says Brent Eubanks, vice president
of technology optimization at Ticketmaster. “To accomplish this,
we needed all our data in one place so we could streamline our
IT operations and provide data visibility to people across the
business to deliver services and products for the greatest value.”
To achieve its optimization goals, Ticketmaster’s IT staff has hefty
responsibilities—and the need for a flexible infrastructure capable of delivering
data to business users to help them make more informed decisions. Ticketmaster
had been using colocation services: data centers where it rented space for
servers and other computing hardware. It also had a few existing public cloud
accounts, but was having issues with determining showback and technical value
measures for public cloud usage across products and business units.
The Road to Optimization
As part of its transition to a data-driven culture with smart use of technology,
the company decided to transition purely to the public cloud to gain
efficiencies, reduce costs, and use IT resources “just in time” and “just enough.”
In February 2017, Live Nation announced a selection of Amazon Web Services as cloud infrastructure
provider. But the transition to viewing IT as a fixed asset to a cloud-based, elastic utility required new ways
of operating, new habits, revamped mindsets for running technical and business operations, and a reliable
accounting showback model for financial, PMO, and reporting IT budgets.
One key roadblock was visibility. Ticketmaster was unclear whether or not its transition from a mixed
colocation/public cloud to a purely public cloud model was delivering the success metrics it hoped to
achieve. The company wanted to ensure it was obtaining value from its IT investment while bringing the
highest-quality user experience to fans.
Another big question: how could entities within Ticketmaster be operationally responsible for the IT
resources they use? All of these unknowns required education among teams such as finance and IT and
intelligence-based analytics to solve the efficiency and optimization challenges of its transition to the
public cloud.
“My job is to help the company gain insights and awareness on how much value we’re
getting from our IT efforts,” says Eubanks. “I ask myself everyday: how can we become
more savvy cloud users and quantify and measure our progress along the way toward
technology optimization, using data to drive the business, and moving fully to the
public cloud?”
The Solution
After a detailed and comprehensive analysis of solutions on the market, Ticketmaster selected Cloudyn,
provider of multi-cloud business management solutions, to solve the efficiency and optimization challenges
of transitioning from its hybrid colocation and cloud strategy to a fully public cloud. Cloudyn supported
a successful pilot phase that included custom entity mapping, multiple cost allocation rules, and new
strategies that would clarify allocations and showbacks. Ticketmaster’s technology optimization team
focused on the existing services already in the public cloud in early 2016 and implemented Cloudyn to gain
insight into IT resources to efficiently manage IT, forecast cloud usage to identify projected costs in relation
to product growth, and increase visibility into cost breakdowns based on business units.
Ticketmaster also used Cloudyn as a financial enabler to gain visibility into items such as company and
product codes so business unit owners and finance can see in an instant the IT resources they’re using.
Cloudyn lets everyone organize many moving parts such as product codes and linked accounts, then map
them back to finance codes. This allows users to access allocation models of what goes where, and organize
and set up the entire showback system, with great agility.
“The focus this year has been on how to enable product delivery teams to gain insights
and awareness so they can see what IT resources are being utilized, and what they are
achieving from a product level so we can establish a fair showback model,” says Eubanks.
The Results
Cloudyn has proven to be very intuitive, with customizable dashboards for different groups, so users can
have the flexibility to answer their own questions. Their curiosity and reactions about business improvements
have grown over time, reinforcing Ticketmaster’s data-driven culture, a competitive edge for the company.
“Cloudyn has helped across the board by forecasting inventory, costs, and cleanup—
things that may have been overlooked such as bad habits or waste,” says Eubanks. “With
Cloudyn, we started shining a light on low hanging fruit and then continuously improved
from there.”
For Ticketmaster, Cloudyn has streamlined the journey of moving the necessary IT resources to support
products into the cloud. Cloudyn provides the ability to measure, share, and improve process, so that results
of actions being implemented or IT assets being used is immediately visible. Cloudyn has given the company
an organized, insightful way to obtain value from IT assets and make people aware of how to optimize their
usage and track it back to their product uptake.
So far, the results have been impressive; Ticketmaster has seen individual workloads optimized by 56-77%.
They have seen business metrics such as budget variance and inventory forecasting improved by 42-64%.
From a global view across all products and accounts, Ticketmaster has seen improved technical metrics
including workload optimization and RI planning and purchasing change from a trending increase in cost per
GB RAM of 4% month over month to a 15% reduction.
“It’s been fun watching the spark ignite across all of our teams, because prior to Cloudyn,
few people knew how to optimize their cloud services,” says Eubanks. “Now that they do,
I can help guide them to optimize their skills and methods, and it’s very rewarding. The
best outcome is that we walk out of meetings and there’s no vagueness or questioning
any more. That brings an immense amount of satisfaction.”
Many enterprise insights today demand a lot of time and questions. Did the investment work? How do I
report it? How do I put my thumb on what made us save money or do better overall as a business?
Today, the employees and management at Ticketmaster can see across the supply chain if there is a goal
variance or a growth forecast, and act accordingly. They can better manage growth targets to make better
decisions on procurement or product launches. Purchase decisions, too, have been automated through
Cloudyn’s sophisticated algorithms that help Ticketmaster make informed new product decisions and price
cuts, using data to keep pace in a market that keeps getting more complex.
“With Cloudyn, we can answer important questions,” says Eubanks. “We have been able
to optimize many individual workloads by more than half or sometimes even two to three
or four times. Whether it’s product owners, senior directors, or C-level executives, they
get immediate measurement in an intuitive format. That’s how massive Cloudyn’s role
is for a company considering a move to the cloud, undergoing a company-wide digital
transformation, and building a data-driven culture.”
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