In 2003 there was no Wales Millennium Centre. It was a hole in the ground still. So first challenge, build a building; second challenge, build an audience.

We had to create an audience for the building. And to do that, we needed to have the best system that was available, and that was, and still is today, Tessitura.

From the beginning

We were Europe's first licensee. We are a consortium where Wales Millennium Centre is the master licensee, and we have seven organizations. Some are resident in the building; the furthest away is the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, which is 180 miles away from the building. The Wales Millennium Centre is a performing arts organization, so we've got a whole raft of different genres, from opera to dance, through to an orchestra.

What Tessitura enables us to do is to effectively have a real quality relationship with our customers that we just couldn't get from another system. 

A synergistic relationship

Tessitura being a not-for-profit organisation — obviously the Wales Millennium Centre is also not-for-profit, like many other cultural institutions — is a great synergistic relationship for us. We are not held at the hostage of fortune by a commercial operator who is telling us how to run our business or what needs to be developed. We're actually able to work with the Network. It's an amazing ecosystem of community out there, of members which are all collaborating together in all sorts of scales and weights. And that synergistic gain you get from working with a not-for-profit enables us just to have, what can only be called, a beautiful relationship.

What Tessitura enables us to do is to effectively have a real quality relationship with our customers that we just couldn't get from another system

So in Europe, we've worked with the Network to help us to build a community further. We have a user group, which has now turned into an annual conference, which has about 350 people coming to it. But, running alongside that, we have an executive track, a group of executives come together to talk about the strategic issues. We've also created another group where we're able to meet just a couple of times a year to really talk about what's stopping us from achieving our business goals, and the Network's been fantastic at facilitating that to happen, and also enabling us to come together and act as that friendly, confident and friendly facilitator for making our ability to work together. So we can collaborate, we can all achieve what we want to get the best out of for our organizations.

It's amazing, the cultural infrastructure in Europe and in the world. Everyone has got the same problems. In a commercial world, everyone will be fighting against each other. In the cultural sector, everyone works together.