“We're making a push at the Arsht Center to move everything to the cloud,”

said James J Thompson, Vice President of Technical Services.

The Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County has been using Tessitura even before completing construction on the venue. “Tessitura at the Arsht Center really is our lifeblood,” James said. The platform “brings to us a single pane of glass so that we can have a holistic view of our patrons.”

In 2023, the center reached an inflection point. “We were looking at needing to do lots of upgrades to our infrastructure to improve performance and bring us into the next generation,” James explained. They investigated self-hosting with major cloud providers. However, they discovered some unexpected trade-offs, including high costs. Investing more in physical infrastructure on-site was similarly expensive.

Discovering the benefits of Tessitura’s cloud hosting

The team then explored Tessitura’s cloud hosting. Housed in AWS’s state-of-the-art cloud service, it offers leading security features, including advanced firewalls and bot protection.

“We want to realize the benefits of scalability. We want to realize the benefits of security. And we really want to realize the benefits of not dealing with that infrastructure ourselves,” James said. “As hardware upgrades become more and more frequent, and more and more expensive, leveraging the cloud really started to make sense for us.”

Data security was top of mind. “It’s hard to trust other people to handle my data and my services,” James admitted. But he felt confident that Tessitura knows its technology best.

“The company’s staff wrote the application, know it much better than we do and can secure it much better than we can,” he said. 

After moving to Tessitura’s cloud hosting, the Arsht Center realized a 15% savings on what they would have paid to self-host in the cloud. Plus, they didn’t have to compromise on data needs. “We realized that there really weren’t any data trade-offs,” James said. “There wasn't anything that we wouldn’t have access to.”

They also enjoy other key improvements. “One of the things I love now about having Tessitura hosted by Tessitura is that we don't have to deal with upgrades anymore,” James said. “Now, when it's time to upgrade our system, we fill out the form. We say, ‘Here are our windows of upgrade opportunity,’ and they just do it. That really takes labor burden off us and saves cost.”

“We want to realize the benefits of scalability. We want to realize the benefits of security. And we really want to realize the benefits of not dealing with that infrastructure ourselves.”

The reduced burden on staff extends beyond upgrades. Operating in Tessitura’s cloud environment lets James’ team focus on areas of higher impact. 

“Having Tessitura host our applications now allows me and my staff to focus more on managing the applications and the people rather than managing the infrastructure,” he said. “So, we’re able to shift our skill sets. We’re able to shift our personnel from being infrastructure managers to being application managers.” 

Next step: Tessitura Merchant Services

“Moving to Tessitura’s hosting was our next big step in getting a major application off-prem and into the cloud,” James explained. Following this achievement, the next goal was moving the Arsht Center’s payment processing to Tessitura Merchant Services. 

As with hosting, security was a primary consideration. “I was looking forward to getting rid of the PCI burden and reducing our attack surface,” James said. 

This move, too, has been a success. “Now, with Tessitura Merchant Services, we have better security. We have fewer steps along the reconciliation path, and our fees are lower,” James said. “I’m really looking forward to next year when I have to submit all of my PCI paperwork and, instead of the 75-page document, I have 12 questions to answer.”

“We have a saying at the Arsht Center: ‘If it's not in Tessitura, it didn't happen.’” 

The right solution

With all infrastructure decisions, the Arsht Center prioritizes customer satisfaction. “We want to make sure we’re providing the right solution for our staff so that we can give our staff and our patrons a great experience,” he said. 

Tessitura plays a key role. “There's really not an aspect of our business that doesn't come out of Tessitura or go through Tessitura,” James said. “We have a saying at the Arsht Center: ‘If it's not in Tessitura, it didn't happen.’”

Top photo of AileyCamp Miami final performance by Justin Namon, ra-haus.