IT in opera and ballet: A Computer Weekly Downtime Upload podcast

By

Cliff Saran, Managing Editor

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We speak to Keith Nolan, head of technology delivery, Royal Ballet and Opera about using IT to save money

The Covid-19 pandemic had a profound effect on the arts, and technology has helped it adapt to the post-pandemic world patrons now expect. As Keith Nolan, head of technology delivery at Royal Ballet and Opera notes: “The world has changed quite a lot.”

One of the changes that took place at West End theatres and at Royal Ballet and Opera is that people choose to purchase tickets differently. “Since that Covid period, about 95% of our tickets are actually bought online and when you’re running a ticketing service, you need servers, infrastructure and cloud computing,” he says.

Among the technological developments that gained a foothold during the Covid pandemic is streaming as Nolan explains: “We felt that we needed to maintain a connection with our patrons and also with the country and the community that sits around dance and singing, trying to offer something back during those darker times when we were all at home.” During these times, he says Royal Ballet and Opera started sharing content online through its social media channels, YouTube and Instagram. 

Nolan says the online digital experience is a key part of Royal Ballet and Opera. “We have shops, we have restaurants, we’re open to the public during the day and people can just come in and visit us. We are a public attraction. We require lots of digital experiences, lots of systems like point of sale and digital signage, which make our space attractive to guests and tourists around London.”

IT is a back-office function and what the public does not see is all services the Royal Ballet and Opera needs as a business such as IT support, human resources, and finance. But it also supports the broadcast team, which is used to stream shows to UK cinemas. “There’s a lot of IT infrastructure that sits around broadcasting to cinemas,” says Nolan. The IT teams need to maintain the internet connections, firewalls, and what he calls “advanced stuff in terms of precision time protocol” for the broadcast systems.

When asked about the technology Royal Ballet and Opera has deployed, Nolan says: “We’re always looking at technologies that can bring the total cost of ownership.” This is perhaps one of the reasons it is a Nutanix customer. Prior to the pandemic, Royal Ballet and Opera operated two large datacentres. Nolan says: “The reason we started working with Nutanix is that we were very aware, like most organisations, that whether we had private datacentres or we existed fully in the cloud, our total cost of ownership was really quite high.  

“We needed to work out how we bring the cost of ownership for our IT infrastructure down.” After speaking to Nutanix and the Science Museum, which had gone down a hybrid cloud route, Royal Ballet and Opera deployed Nutanix to enable certain workloads to run in the public cloud while keeping other workloads on-premise. “We kind of got the best of both worlds,” he says. “Overall, it has meant we could go from two datacentres to one, which was a huge cost saving.” This resulted in a 25% savings in IT costs.

Royal Ballet and Opera has also consolidated its Azure and AWS cloud instances down to just AWS, using Nutanix’s NC2 to provide granular control of its public cloud resources.