Johannesburg, 16 Jul 2002
An overloaded ticketing system left World Cup cricket fans seething yesterday, but system developer Dimension Data says transactions are flowing smoothly today across all channels.
The World Cup ticketing system developed by local IT giant DiData experienced huge volumes yesterday, causing the Web site to be shut down and traffic reprioritised to the stadiums and call centres.
"It hasn`t gone off well and we are most apologetic," said Cricket World Cup executive director Ali Bacher yesterday, in a Sapa report.
"It`s been a very difficult day for the organising committee and cricket supporters, particularly at the Wanderers."
Greg Vercellotti, DiData development director heading up the system, said yesterday that the integrity of the ticketing system was intact and a decision to reprioritise traffic to the call centres and stadiums was taken after all channels were hit by unprecedented interest.
Allocation of the 228 000 tickets available to the public is split into 60% for the various cricketing grounds and 20% to call centres and the World Cup Web site respectively.
At 11.30am today, Mathew Coad, GM of DiData`s e-business unit, said transactions were flowing smoothly through all three channels.
"By 11.10am, 3 100 transactions had been concluded over the Web, 4 360 through the call centre and 1 600 from the various stadiums," he said.
The bulk of the interest is still for tickets at the Wanderers Stadium, where the final of the World Cup will be played, and Coad says he expects the demand to die down once all the ticket packages for that venue have been sold.
"There is still a large amount of interest from fans, but 75% of the Wanderers packages have gone and when they have all been sold we expect the demand to start slowing."
DiData has a team of 38 working on the project with the United Cricket Board around the country, with additional Telkom support.
Coad says DiData expects the first batch of payment transactions to go through without a hitch. The payments are not being conducted live, but will be processed in batches using the Ivory gateway and Nedcor as the facilitating bank.
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