In the world of entertainment, where the spotlight shines on the latest blockbusters and thrilling theme park rides, the behind-the-scenes technology orchestrating these experiences often goes unnoticed. Yet, for Village Roadshow, a titan in the Australian entertainment industry, captivating audiences since the golden age of drive-in cinema, a technological revamp was not just a performance enhancer – it was a necessity. This is the story of how Village Roadshow, with a legacy dating back to 1954, turned to Workato to modernise its integration platform and set the stage for a future of seamless operations and show-stopping success.

Facing the music of traditional integration

Village Roadshow’s symphony of entertainment offerings, from cinemas to theme parks, risked being out of tune due to an outdated integration platform. The existing platform was a relic of a bygone era, demanding a specialist ensemble of seasoned developers and consultants, leading to high operating costs and slow market responses. System outages were also a regular disruption, striking a sour note during peak seasons and blockbuster releases. As a workaround, staff even went back to relying on rigid point-to-point integrations that were costly to maintain and did not offer control over governance and security. With revenue and reputation at stake, Village Roadshow was at a crossroads. 

Casting the lead role

Group CIO Arul Arogyanathan led the quest for a solution that was not just a stopgap but a star performer. It had to be agile, scalable, and secure, with cloud-native and low-code capabilities to empower their technology team to focus on the business, not on building from scratch. Village Roadshow’s IT organisation was also pivoting to a more distributed operating model that the new platform needed to support – this meant evolving from a traditional centralised model to having centralised governance but federated execution. The goal was to drive innovation and operational efficiency, optimise costs and mitigate risks. 

After extensive market research, Workato emerged as the best fit, meeting both non-negotiable criteria like speed to value and nice-to-haves like cost-effectiveness. The rigorous evaluation was not over here. To validate their decision, Village Roadshow challenged Workato to prove itself.

How Workato took centre stage

Workato’s dazzling performance went beyond the script, by delivering on five distinct use cases, some of which the previous system could not even handle. Here’s what Workato delivered:

• Fixed a performance bottleneck that prevented Village Roadshow from giving customers information on which cinemas their selected movie airs in and vice versa. It took a mere 8 weeks to go-live with this end-to-end exercise, contrasting with the 9 months it took them to build this on the traditional platform, even with 5 developers, 2 consultants and a managed services partner.
• Demonstrated real-time integration between guest experience platform and Point of Sale system to eliminate the need for intermediaries. 
• Facilitated data exchange to and from SAP using existing connectors so that specialised skills are not needed.
• Swiftly built a custom connector to integrate SAP with the property management system.
• Demonstrated in-built security measures and encryption protocols that safeguard sensitive payment data flowing between SAP and an external payment gateway. 

”Workato’s platform is very flexible & agile. It is able to connect to some of our key legacy systems using traditional file-based batched interfaces, to modern SaaS platforms using API-based synchronous interfaces for real-time data retrieval, as well as systems that support asynchronous event streaming for near real-time use-cases. It proved to be ideal for an organization like Village which is on a tech modernization journey.

Crucially, our legacy iPaaS platform required us to change our operating model to be more centralised but Workato was adaptable and strongly aligned to our new integration strategy – a decentralised model with central governance. Also, with security being paramount in today’s world, having a secure framework in-built into Workato made it very secure yet simple for us to develop workflows because our application owners and developers need not worry about security.” 

The results: A standing ovation

Here’s what Village Roadshow achieved with Workato:

• Zero outages post-implementation, even when stress-tested against 4 times of historical load. Smooth glitch-free handling of peak loads, even during major blockbuster releases like ‘Barbie’ and Taylor Swift’s documentary launch.
• 66% reduction in operating costs, with the work of 5 specialized integration developers being done by half a DevOps team member, who only needs to define guardrails and templates on how Workato should be used.
• 4x increase in speed to market, with 3 entire divisions migrated to Workato in just 12 weeks. 
• Code optimization, with 4000 lines of code rewritten in less than 100 lines.

Partnering for an encore performance

A vital element of success was Village Roadshow’s strong partnership with Workato. 

Stuart Wood-Rich, Head of Technology, explains: “Our partners predicted that they would need to scale their infrastructure 5 times to cater to the launch of Taylor Swift’s documentary. We got the news 48 hours before the launch. So we made a call to Workato and the next day, they bumped our concurrency from 50 to 200. No questions asked. No commercial negotiations whatsoever. That’s what I mean by partnership.”

With the curtains closed on a successful act, Village Roadshow is already preparing for the encore. This involves leveraging Workato to automate end-to-end processes beyond IT and robustly integrating new growth businesses, so as to shape the new era of entertainment.