Paciolan Wins Big with College Sports Ticket Sales
Paciolan and F5 deliver secure, seamless ticketing that drives revenue and fan engagement for college sports programs. Fans enjoy fast, reliable ticket access and a frictionless purchase experience, strengthening the connection to their favorite teams.
Business Challenge
If you’ve ever bought a ticket for a mega-star concert or prime-time sports event you know that navigating the online booking system can be as intense as the event itself. That’s where Paciolan comes in. As the premiere online ticketing solutions provider for U.S. college sports, it ensures that online ticketing is as fast and fair as possible.
Signing up with Paciolan enables colleges to add user-friendly pages to their websites that showcase tickets for sporting events, from football and hockey to basketball and soccer. The platform also supports fundraising initiatives and offers a powerful suite of digital marketing tools that colleges can use to promote ticket sales and send fans personalized messages via email and other channels.
It’s a significant responsibility in a multibillion-dollar industry. In 2024, Paciolan sold 120 million tickets to fans nationwide, spanning Power 4 and Division 1 conferences, as well as countless colleges in between, from the West Coast to the Rocky Mountains to the Midwest. Muhammad Shoaib, Director of Reliability Engineering at Paciolan, says: “Our clients not only rely on us to sell tickets to events. They depend on us to build customer relationships and strengthen their reputation with loyal followers.”
Solutions
With such a passionate fan base, there’s no room for error at any of these touchpoints, from ticket selection to the checkout cart or promotional email. So Paciolan relies heavily on its team of technology partners to provide a fast, non-stop service.
“F5 BIG-IP is the quarterback of our IT stack,” says Shoaib. “For more than 20 years, it has helped us call the plays, read defenses, and pass on secure, high-speed ticketing experiences to colleges and their fans.”
Shoaib singles out F5’s load-balancing solution BIG-IP LTM, which protects backend servers from traffic spikes and intelligently directs customers to virtual waiting rooms. This includes managing connection rates and setting limits to ensure fair access.
“The showtime experience starts the moment a customer logs on to the event page,” says Shoaib. “F5 helps ensure that the journey from the online ticket booth to turnstile is as smooth as possible.”
With the high demand for major sporting events, swift and fair transaction processing is essential. Shoaib recalls a college football event where 250,000 people attempted to purchase just 50,000 tickets. F5’s technology ensured that tickets were allocated efficiently while minimizing wait times for customers. “F5 ensures that we deliver a fast, transparent experience so that fans can save the adrenaline and excitement for the game itself.” F5 also enables Paciolan to keep pace in a fast-moving market where competition and threats evolve on a near-daily basis.
Paciolan has been migrating to the cloud—a critical move to optimize costs, scale operations, and enhance service for colleges and their sports fans. Once again, F5 plays a central role as the company moves away from its on-premises architecture.
The new AWS-based cloud architecture integrates Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) for container orchestration and F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE) for advanced traffic management and security, offering scalability, flexibility, and deeper control than native AWS services.
Using Terraform, Paciolan automates the provisioning and configuration of BIG-IP VE instances in AWS. Terraform enables seamless deployment of EC2 instances, networking setup (e.g., VLANs, Self IPs), and application services like pools, monitors, and iRules. This automation allows Paciolan to quickly deploy new instances or modify configurations with consistency and minimal effort. By combining AWS, BIG-IP VE, and Terraform, Paciolan achieves a secure, scalable, and fully automated cloud infrastructure.
Results
Supports business growth
The U.S. college sports market is a multi-billion-dollar industry. To capitalize on this growth, Paciolan continually expands its network, bringing new colleges onto its platform. Each new partnership requires seamless onboarding, robust security, and the ability to handle unpredictable surges in ticket sales. With F5, Paciolan scales rapidly, ensuring new colleges can integrate without disruption. “With F5, we onboard new schools quickly while maintaining the speed, security, and reliability that fans and athletic departments expect,” says Shoaib.
Unmatched feature set
Paciolan, like any technology-driven business, continuously assesses alternatives to its existing tech stack. However, they found that no other solution compares to F5. One load balancing option Shoaib considered covered only 1% of F5’s capabilities, while another application delivery controller fell short in iRules design. “F5 remains the most feature-rich, high-performance solution for our needs,” says Shoaib.
Rock-solid reliability
F5 delivers exceptional uptime. Paciolan has run F5 units for years without needing a reboot, except during upgrades. This reliability ensures seamless operations, making it one of the most stable solutions the company has ever used. “F5 BIG-IP runs faultlessly in the background. IT support and engineers can spend their time on innovation and new products rather than day-to-day system maintenance,” says Shoaib.
Best-in-class security
As a high-traffic, e-commerce business, Paciolan must comply with strict regulations that govern online sales. F5 excels in security, ensuring that Paciolan passes PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance scans without fail. Frequent patches and proactive fixes issued by F5 keep Paciolan’s infrastructure protected from emerging threats, ensuring compliance and safety at all times.
Seamless cloud flexibility
Paciolan has relied on F5 for over 20 years to manage on-premises workloads and is embracing a hybrid cloud strategy by incorporating F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition into its operations. This approach allows the company to handle large-scale ticket sales and traffic surges effectively, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted experience for its customers. While F5’s cloud-based LTMs support Paciolan’s modern, cloud-hosted applications, the company continues to maintain on-premises LTMs to serve its legacy and yet-to-be migrated applications. This dual deployment model leverages F5’s hybrid cloud capabilities, enabling Paciolan to scale dynamically, optimize performance during peak demand periods, and uphold robust security. “F5 gives us the agility to expand into the cloud without sacrificing the control and reliability we’ve always trusted,” says Shoaib.
Built for the future of digital ticketing
As Paciolan embraces hybrid and multi-cloud environments, F5 enables the business to embrace future commercial opportunities as U.S. college sports adapt and innovate. This includes more personalized fan offers. F5’s advanced solutions give Paciolan the agility to support colleges and sports organizations seeking to flourish in this dynamic environment. “As fan expectations evolve, F5 ensures secure, high-performance experiences in the stadium or online,” says Shoaib.
- Deliver seamless ticketing
- Enhance security
- Scale with flexibility
- Enable cloud migration
- Manage high traffic
- Defend against threats
- Support rapid growth
- Transition to cloud