Lausanne Hockey Club and ELCA Cloud Services Revitalize Fan Engagement Using SecuTix and AWS

Lausanne Hockey Club (LHC), one of Switzerland’s biggest sporting attractions, used the SecuTix ticketing solution to revitalize its relationship with fans and help it deliver on its cloud-first strategy. SecuTix runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the company works with AWS Partner ELCA Cloud Services to provide a scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solution. Using SecuTix, Lausanne Hockey Club created new revenue streams by selling tickets to off season events and launching new services for fans.

Like many organizations, Lausanne Hockey Club experienced major challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 100-year-old Swiss sports club’s ticket earnings fell 28 percent. It also moved stadiums three times and hired a new manager.

Some fans had drifted away during these changes. The club decided a new ticketing platform was needed as part of a strategy to re-engage with fans, increase sales, and revive its business with new revenue streams.

LHC installed a solution from SecuTix that runs on AWS. SecuTix now works with ELCA Cloud Services to offer a modern, cloud-based approach to ticketing that supports new modes of engagement and services for hockey fans across Switzerland.

Following several moves in and out of temporary locations, LHC found a home in its newly built stadium, the Vaudoise Aréna, which has a 9600-seat capacity in Hockey mode.

The club wanted to provide the same stability for its technology. “We felt it was essential to make changes that would give our whole organization a solid platform for the coming years, and a new ticketing solution was a major part of that plan,” says Chris Wolf, CEO at Lausanne Hockey Club Group.

A sports club’s ticketing system is crucial to success. For LHC, it’s a key point of contact with its thousands of fans and provides a significant annual income.

LHC knew it needed a system with flexibility and responsiveness to change ticket types, prices, and allocations quickly and easily. It also wanted to offer fans the convenience of buying tickets on a mobile-first platform. “Our previous ticketing system didn’t give us enough control over the types of tickets we sold,” says Wolf. “Making any changes, such as adding a new ticket pricing tier, was time-consuming and costly for our team to implement. It was damaging our engagement with fans.”

LHC chose the SecuTix platform because its modular approach offered greater flexibility and ease of integration with its existing IT services. It was also quick to install, LHC was able to sell tickets on SecuTix just 5 weeks following its first setup, helping the club regain control of its ticketing strategy.

It can now easily sell tickets for its hockey games and for sporting and non-sporting events held in its stadium during the off-season. This creates new revenue streams for the club. LHC now hosts charity games, entertainment events, and other activities, all year round. “SecuTix helps us take a more sophisticated approach to marketing and strategy,” says Wolf. “We’re able to think broadly about what events we want to host because we know SecuTix can handle the ticketing for any type of event.”

Using SecuTix, LHC can control all aspects of its ticket sales, from price and ticket type to adding tickets for new events. “It’s more than just ticket sales, it’s a whole fanbase management system,” says Laurent Burgbacher, professional services senior manager at SecuTix. “SecuTix gives the club the independence to sell and manage its own tickets, letting it develop its own packages that it can sell to fans,” he adds.

LHC now offers 25 different ticket packages for the hockey season, including season tickets, family packages, and mini season tickets, which are packages of three or six matches. “Our new SecuTix ticketing platform is an important part of delivering a better experience to our fans,” says Wolf.

Because it’s a cloud-based platform running on AWS, SecuTix also supports LHC’s ongoing transformation plan to embrace modern, cloud-first technologies and solutions.

A ticketing platform needs to scale quickly to handle variable customer demand and be flexible enough to meet the needs of diverse customer audiences. To provide this, SecuTix runs its ticketing system on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for any workload, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere.

Using AWS and working with ELCA Cloud Services gives SecuTix the agility and efficiency it needs. “SecuTix uses AWS to help it take advantage of serverless computing,” says Laurent Prat, head of cloud consulting at ELCA Cloud Services, the AWS partner providing technical infrastructure support to SecuTix. “It reduces SecuTix’s costs and minimizes the amount of infrastructure it needs to manage. It can scale up resources quickly and focus on providing clients such as LHC with the best possible product—all without the distraction of infrastructure maintenance.”

SecuTix and ELCA Cloud Services have completed several successful modernization projects, such as migrating SecuTix’s legacy Oracle database to Amazon RDS for Oracle, which allows it to set up, operate, and scale Oracle databases in the cloud. “Using AWS, SecuTix’s developers can work in a decentralized way, making their release cycle more fluid and faster,” says Prat. “This means the team is more agile and can better adapt the solution to respond to customer needs.”

The partnership with ELCA Cloud Services allows SecuTix to do what it does best, develop and manage a ticketing platform. “ELCA takes away our technical burden and allows us to focus on our core business,” says Burgbacher.

In the coming months, LHC plans to launch TIXNGO, a blockchain-based solution from SecuTix that allows LHC to offer fans their own digital wallet. Any tickets bought through the TIXNGO service will be paper-free, making it a simpler and more secure experience for fans. LHC is deploying the TIXNGO service with support from SecuTix and ELCA.

Like most sports franchises, LHC’s definition of success comes down to pleasing fans. “Using SecuTix has helped us improve our interactions with the fans,” says LHC’s Wolf. “After losing touch with some fans due to the disturbance of the past few years, we’re now winning them back with great experiences and better communication, which are all built on SecuTix and AWS.”