An online portal, TicketGoose.com was established in August 2007 with the aim of providing commuters the facility to book bus tickets online. The portal, promoted by Efficsys InfoTech India Private Limited, offers users information on ticket prices and availability as well as booking facilities for buses plying on routes connecting 3,000 destinations across south India. The company has tie-ups with about 250 bus travel partners for offering ticketing services.

Being an online portal, TicketGoose. com recognises the importance of telecom in effective service delivery to clients. Accordingly, the company has been using telecom as a strategic tool for handling large volumes of data as well as streamlining operations.

tele.net takes a look at the company’s telecom initiatives…

Legacy system

TicketGoose.com began operations by installing two dedicated servers for production and a legacy Java technology framework for application development. The company used this set-up for about five years. Over a period of time, it increased the number of servers from two to seven in order to cater to the increasing information load for effectively running its applications and data base stations.

The shift

To meet the requirements of a growing business and heavy data traffic, the company has been adopting new technologies. It has now started shifting its existing telecommunications set-up to cloud infrastructure. “The company’s current set-up of dedicated servers was proving to be inadequate in handling the sudden rise in traffic on the website. To address this issue, new servers were required, which was a time-consuming exercise. Sizing the servers based on the current traffic flow was also a challenge,” says Karthi Easwaramoorthy, co-founder and president, TicketGoose.com.

“In order to handle the growth in traffic on the website and reduce operational costs, the company is in the process of moving its existing telecom set-up to the cloud. Full migration will be completed by August 2013,” says Easwaramoorthy.

TicketGoose.com has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for availing of cloud technologies such as AWS EC2, S3, and relational database service (RDS), R53. The organisation’s various teams responsible for production, deployment, monitoring and support have been provided access to the new cloud-based infrastructure.

In the second phase of migration, the company will integrate other AWS services like autoscaling, simple queue service, simple notification service, Elasticache and Multi Az that will help the organisation streamline its existing processes. For example, autoscaling services will enable the company to handle irregular traffic spikes during the holiday season.

The company operates two call centres in Chennai and Bengaluru. It has deployed an internet-based leased line network, along with primary rate interface lines with IP-PBX cards, besides using five leased lines provided by Bharti Airtel. It has also deployed a fibre backbone network with a connectivity speed of 8 Mbps.

Challenges and benefits

According to Easwaramoorthy, the biggest challenge faced by the company while upgrading its telecom infrastructure was managing integrated applications. Moreover, all applications had to be rearchitected to avail of the benefits provided by cloud computing and scaling technologies. “The company is moving towards service-oriented architecture for our applications and will use RESTful architecture. This will make the applications easily scalable and support heterogeneous mediums like web, mobile and application programming interface partners. Another challenge is transferring existing data from the company’s database to the cloud RDS.”

Challenges notwithstanding, the new infrastructure set-up will ensure that the company’s website is up and running at all times, thereby delivering quality service to customers. It will also enable TicketGoose.com to scale up operations and cater to its growing business needs. The AWS infrastructure will monitor the system, and notify and address system failures. In addition, autoscaling will help lower operating costs. “The pay-as-you-use model will significantly help us reduce costs. Cloud technology will help us assess exact resource utilisation, which, in turn, would enable us to size our servers and minimise server costs,” says Easwaramoorthy.

The road ahead

Going forward, TicketGoose.com plans to upgrade its technology stack and will migrate to 100 per cent service-oriented architecture. The company plans to upgrade its customer support software and integrate it with applications that identify the booking history of customers, etc. It is also looking to adopt DevOps tools, application monitoring and automated alerting systems to ensure smooth functioning of the company’s website along with other processes.