Nine years before we became NCR Edinburgh, Mobiqa started with the Ticketing Platform. The Ticketing Platform began as a service for sending barcoded tickets to mobile devices. Back then, the challenges for the platform concentrated on getting barcodes to display on heterogeneous mobile devices which were running a variety of operating systems in varied and wondrous form-factors.
Under NCR's stewardship in the the four years since the acquisition, we have seen our customer base grow and the mobile market mature — and, with this, the challenges have changed. Today, the ticketing platform is consumed worldwide, generating barcoded tickets for airlines, cinema chains, and live event companies. Its main concerns are now around scale and user experience. The volume of barcoded tickets produced on a daily basis require the platform to be scalable and resilient; with increased sophistication of mobile devices and the people who use them, the platform now needs to provide a richer experience than just a barcode displayed on a mobile device.
The ticketing platform meets these challenges as a 24/7 Enterprise SaaS solution running on a Java™ stack, with monitoring supported by the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana). It handles almost half a million barcoded ticket requests a day, using queues for scalable asynchronous communication between the distributed services that form its building blocks. Barcoded tickets are viewable on mobile devices and desktop machines, and are distributed to end users through SMS, email, Apple Passbook, and Google Cloud Messaging.