Fall is upon us again, and in North America that means one thing: playoff season in Major League Baseball. At NComputing, we’d usually be watching on the sidelines like (almost) everyone else, but this year we began working on an exciting project with our friends at Tickets.com who provide ticketing for all the Major League Baseball clubs (and many other sporting and arts venues).

You see, earlier this year we discovered that Tickets.com, the world’s largest and most popular event ticketing source, had just completed a major overhaul of their back-end infrastructure. They ripped out the old and replaced it with a brand new Citrix® XenDesktop® deployment so they could serve up virtual desktops across their organization and be much more agile with things like system maintenance and upgrades. When we heard this, we engaged them about what end points they were going to use with their shiny new backend. Much to our delight, they hadn’t landed on an end point yet.

Their primary end user audience was their ticket sales staff who man the booths at stadiums that are selling and printing game tickets. When we spoke with Tickets.com, they had a few clear goals for what their end point of choice would have to deliver to these end users:

• Powerful end user experience that supports their line of business applications as well as high definition multimedia.
• Keep all customer data strictly private and in the data center to maintain PCI compliances.
• Ability to quickly cycle the device if needed while a line of customers was potentially present.
• Help keep the total cost of ownership for their virtualization project down by reducing device acquisition cost and prolonging device refresh cycles.

After a thoughtful evaluation, Tickets.com and NComputing were ready to demonstrate how the N-series thin clients could meet and exceed their end user needs in production. We deployed 100 N-series thin clients across two Major League Baseball stadiums in California. Each stadium required just one day to install the thin clients (which are Citrix Ready HDX Verified) and the results they were hoping for were immediate. Joe Choti, President & CEO of Tickets.com said:

“After an extensive analysis across thin client options to work with our Citrix environment, NComputing is our partner of choice. The NComputing N-series exceeds all of the requirements, and we have a valuable partner whose N-Series thin clients and personnel will play a key role as we build and maintain reliable ticketing technology for our venue partners and their customers.”

The accolades were great, and Joe was so impressed with how the N-series streamlined their end points at the first two stadiums, and Tickets.com is already on board to expand their N-series deployment beyond the first two stadiums. But you don’t have to take my word for any of this, you can check out the video we made with Joe Choti himself right here.