Liverpool Football Club and IBM i

We’re preparing for an announcement next week, so I haven’t blogged as much as I would like, but I wanted to share one of the customer references I talked about last time. If you’ll recall, I mentioned that while many clients do not allow us to mention their names, there are also many who are happy to share their story. Today I’ll spotlight someone from the other side of the Atlantic: the Liverpool Football Club.

Like many of our clients, no matter what the industry, the Liverpool Football Club wants to do a great job for their customers. Their need from the IT solution they buy: Liverpool FC aims to provide the best possible football experience for its supporters and recognized that online ticket sales were a key part of its interaction with its fans. The club decided to review its ticketing platform and create a roadmap for future development.

From more than 20 vendors, the club selected IRIS Ticketing, its incumbent supplier, to deliver a program of enhancements for the TALENT Sport ticketing system. IRIS Ticketing focused on transforming the fans’ experience with a new queuing system, and improved performance by moving the software onto a new IBM Power 720 server.

The team clearly saw benefits from this solution:

1. Increased capacity by 250 percent; the system can now support over 750 concurrent users.
2. Handled 100,000 ticket sales within four days without a single moment of downtime.
3. Queuing system gives supporters a better understanding of the ticketing process, improving customer service and fostering loyalty.

“The upgrade has at least doubled our capacity on the TALENT Sport system, and may even have tripled it.”

— Phil Dutton, Head of Ticketing and Hospitality at Liverpool FC

As is clear by this example, we reach many of our IBM i customers because of the excellent solutions that continue to be invested in and enhanced by ISVs such as IRIS Ticketing. It’s this focus on a customer solution that runs the business reliably, with high performance as well as fit-for-purpose functionality, that remains a winner.

So, whether you’re a fan of Liverpool FC or not, did you know that they use IBM i and Power Systems for their business? Now you do. That’s an example of IBM i in your world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IBM i in Your World

When you go to a bank, do you know what kind of IT equipment is being used to run it? How about when you go to your local courthouse? Or a big retailer? When you check into that hotel? When you call your cable company? When you ship a package?

I wish I were at liberty to tell you the names of every client we have using IBM i, but the fact is, most companies do not give IBM permission to use their names. Those who do, become “references” and we use those references frequently. Current IBM i customers, or companies considering adopting IBM i, like to hear about other businesses who are successfully using it.

Still, while I cannot list every customer, I can mention some. I can also tell you in general about some of the ways you probably encounter users of IBM i in your daily life. In fact, I tweet about these every once in a while, so let’s see a couple of examples.

The above is an example of a long-time client, a member of the IBM i Large User Group (LUG), which is very successful. The business is growing, and if I told you their name, there is a very good chance you would recognize it. In fact, this description could apply to several of our LUG members.

Here’s another “anonymous” example.

Now, you might not have heard of this specific (fast-growing) company, but I can pretty much guarantee you have heard of its parent company. Even without the name, it’s pretty impressive to know that this customer successfully handled more than 100 million online transactions on the Monday after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, and those transactions were running on IBM i, on a very large Power System.

IBM i is extremely prevalent in several key industries in the world. One of them is banking, and the follow tweet contains an actual reference account.

Alex Woodie wrote the article in the link above, about Bank Ekonomi Raharja (BER) in Indonesia. Now, if you are not working with that bank, you might not think this has much to do with you, but the point is that you might well have dealings with a bank that is running on IBM i. Three of the most prevalent banking solution ISVs in the U.S. (FIS, Jack Henry & Associates and Fiserv) have highly successful IBM i solutions – the bank I use is a customer of one of these three – and DataPro is a strong IBM i banking solution provider in Central and South America. Additionally, several of the largest banks around the world use IBM i for key portions of their diverse financial offerings.

What about the parcel delivery industry? This quote from FedEx Ground is in many of my presentations, because they are a long-time reference for the platform.

“Its stability, TCO and speed of development convinced us we should not only maintain our mid-range environment, but expand it to keep it at the center of our operations for the long term. IBM i has enabled us to grow the scale of our environment, while at the same time become more nimble and resilient.”

            --Ken Spangler, VP of IT

However, FedEx is not the only company in the shipping business that counts on the reliability of IBM i running on Power Systems. If you used a package delivery company in the U.S. during this past holiday season, there’s a pretty good chance the business was running on IBM i. You might not have known it, but based on our client list, it certainly could be.

Many of the most successful large businesses in the world, as well as many thousand smaller businesses and governmental entities, keep their customers satisfied while relying on Power Systems and the IBM i operating system. They are all around you, and just like your company, they use this platform because it delivers stability, security, value and innovation that helps them succeed.