Case study / Powerhouse Museum
TNEW: Tessitura ticketing woven into the web estate
Tessitura runs ticketing, membership and CRM for much of the cultural sector, and TNEW is its web storefront. The architecture challenge is integrating it so visitors get one seamless site — while the museum keeps control of brand, performance and analytics.
- Role
- Solutions architect
- Timeline
- 2025 — present
- Platform
- Tessitura / TNEW
- Surface
- Ticketing · membership
The constraint
Tessitura is non-negotiable in a museum of this scale — it holds the constituent records, memberships, donations and every ticket sold. TNEW (Tessitura Network Express Web) is the vendor's hosted purchase path. The naive integration is a hard cut-over: visitors browse the museum site, then get bounced to a differently-branded storefront on another domain, losing session, analytics continuity and trust at the exact moment of purchase.
The approach
The architecture treats TNEW as one bounded context inside the visitor journey rather than a separate site: the content platform owns discovery (what's on, exhibitions, events), TNEW owns the transactional core (inventory, seats, payment, PCI scope), and a thin integration layer keeps identity, session and design continuous across the seam.
- Skinned TNEW to the museum design system so the purchase path reads as the same site [VERIFY]
- Event and performance data synced from Tessitura into the content platform, so 'what's on' pages render from one API with live availability [VERIFY]
- Single sign-on between the web estate and TNEW so members authenticate once — see the Auth0 case study
- Analytics stitched across the domain boundary for a single conversion funnel [VERIFY]
What made it hard
- Legacy API surface — Tessitura's integration points predate modern API conventions; the integration layer normalises them into the platform's contract
- Caching versus live inventory — content pages cache aggressively, seat availability can't; the seam between the two had to be explicit
- Launch-day load — on-sale moments spike like ticketing always does; the discovery side is CDN-buffered so only genuine purchase intent reaches Tessitura
Outcomes
Visitors move from exhibition page to seat selection to payment without perceiving a system boundary, and the museum's CRM stays the single source of truth for every constituent interaction. [VERIFY]