The Mission

A $915 million cultural precinct. One shot at launch. The Powerhouse Parramatta needed an enterprise-grade ticketing platform built from the ground up — capable of carrying the full commercial weight of Australia's most significant new museum venue. No existing template. No margin for failure at opening day.

The Stack

Tessitura handles the back-office — program management, reservations, customer records. Workato sits in the middle as the integration layer, orchestrating data flow across systems. Next.js and Sanity CMS deliver the public-facing purchase experience. Windcave processes payments. Prospect2 handles marketing automation downstream.

Every layer was integrated, tested, and hardened before a single ticket went on sale.

A First for Australian Cultural Institutions

The platform introduced Apple Pay and Google Pay to the Australian cultural sector for the first time. No museum or gallery in the country had deployed it before. That capability is now live, handling real transactions, in one of the most visited institutions in New South Wales.

The Build

Org-wide testing involved 30+ participants across payment validation, database integrity checks, stress testing, and performance benchmarking under load. CI/CD pipelines, PostHog analytics, structured error handling, and deployment monitoring were built into the system — not bolted on after. The architecture was designed for a network, not a single venue.

What Persists

The system is live. The museum is open. The same infrastructure now powers Sydney Observatory and will extend to the upcoming $300 million Powerhouse Ultimo redevelopment. A platform built for one precinct — engineered to hold an entire estate.