What's better than a guided tour of Bristol with Chris Berman? This sports fan paid \$2.50 to find out.

[dturchin]

We took our girls, ages two and four, to see Stanford play Arizona in football on a whim a few months back. They climbed palm trees and mingled with Olympians. We saw 102 points of schoolyard ridiculousness. Stanford was in the BCS top ten while Arizona was on a winning streak and had a Swiss cheese defense. A game like that should have been sold out hours before kickoff and might well have been.

But these days, that doesn't matter. Up until kickoff or tipoff or puck drop, event tickets are available. [Geek-cred punch line…] As with many of life's pleasures, there's an app - heck, a cottage industry - for that. In the case of my Stanford tickets, it was built on ServiceNow.[float=right][img=291x175]http://beyondthebets.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/stanford.jpg[/img][/float]

When I needed tickets I didn't bother checking with the box office or arm-wrestling scalpers or slipping through gate 23 (there goes that secret). I went online and purchased seats on the 50 from a fan who couldn't use them for 97% off face value one hour before game time. I happily paid a $2.50 convenience fee, printed at home, and, for at least an hour, became Daddy the Omnipotent. Until that string cheese incident in the second quarter. Power is short-lived.

I later had an opportunity to hear how the app came to be from its author. Much as I kept attempting to drape him in an S cape and lock him in a phone booth, he humbly claimed to have built the app in a day, integrated it with his company's ERP system in a week, and deployed it to replace an aging SharePoint app within a month. I then got a tour. I wouldn't have been any more impressed getting a tour of the Bristol control room from Berman himself.

It's a simple app, powerful only in that it processes thousands of transactions daily that automate the fulfillment and rebate process for most major league sporting events. Traffic hit an all-time high last year before the MLB all star game. Here's the recipe: build a simple data model (venues have events, events have tickets, tickets have buyers and sellers and statuses) then wrap a bit of workflow, a simple UI, and a few SOAP integrations around it. Nothing more complicated than that and a bit of inspiration from an IT hero who recognized that fulfilling requests to buy tickets is awfully close to fulfilling requests to fix laptops.

Now the CIO who thought she had purchased an ITSM system realizes she actually bought a way to accelerate her career and get IT a permanent seat in the board room. ServiceNow morphed from being an enabling technology for IT to being a business-essential platform for the company. Since deploying the app, corporate profits are up and - here's the kicker - so is internal customer sat because even the IT apps are benefiting from automation techniques used to sell tickets. So I saved a bunch of money and had a special day with the family. Meanwhile, a savvy ServiceNow customer was raking in convenience fees and crushing the competition.

The Index of PaaS Activity

The IPA had a banner month, shaking off its holiday malaise with an impressive gain of 27.9%. PaaS-related job postings (+4.04%) and tweets (+19.05%) pushed the index higher. PaaS-related stocks also contributed to the increase (+2.15%) but indicate little about PaaS activity given the broader S&P 500 index advanced 5.08% during the period.