The Live Sales Management system will provide the UK rail industry with a flexible, highly available cloud-based solution to support ‘ticket-on-departure’ – the collection of rail tickets from self-service ticket machines after buying them earlier on the web.

The company estimates that utilising cloud services will allow the system to scale to a billion tickets per annum by 2018 without the need for additional computer hardware. Currently the ticket-on-departure service handles ticket sales totalling £1.8 billion per annum.

As well as providing a foundation for other delivery channels such as mobile and smartcards, the new system will support the next generation of ticket issuing systems and enable cost reductions and better productivity for all franchises when issuing passenger rail tickets.

UK IT consultancy firm, Smart421, has commenced the development phase of a multi-year contract to design, build and manage the new system, which also provides a foundation for other delivery channels such as mobiles and smartcards.

Steve Howes, managing director at RSP, said: ‘This Live Sales Management project will deliver high quality service at reasonable cost which is good news for all industry stakeholders. We realise that this project will be watched very carefully because of its importance to RSP and the train operating companies we serve.’

Neil Miles, managing director at Smart421, said: ‘Rail ticketing demand goes through seasonal and daily peaks and troughs, which makes it a great use case for cloud computing. By choosing AWS technologies, Smart421 is giving RSP the ability to scale up their infrastructure during peak seasons and scale back during the off-peak times.

‘This means that RSP can save money and time on managing technology infrastructure and can better serve the rail customers of the UK.’

To learn more about Rail Settlement Plan go to www.atoc.org/about-atoc/rail-settlement-plan