By Jay Fitzgerald
Boston Herald General Economics Reporter
Tuesday, June 5, 2007

The Boston Red Sox have sold out more than 300 straight games at Fenway Park.

But there could come a day when the Sox stumble and fan interest wanes, forcing the Sox to act like a mere mortal sports franchise that actually has to pitch tickets with gusto to customers.

That’s one of the reasons the Sox have signed up to use StratBridge Inc.’s software, which tracks almost every detail of each ticket sold - right down to when, where and how much a person or company paid for a seat.

"We’re riding high right now," said Ron Bumgarner, vice president in charge of ticketing for the Red Sox. "But we want to see and track the selling patterns now."

StratBridge, with about 16 employees and based in Harvard, already sells its ticket-sales software to more than 100 professional sports teams - including the Boston Celtics and Boston Bruins.

Matthew Marolda, founder and chief executive of the eight-year-old company, said the "StratTix" software allows teams to "drill down into data" to discover things they never knew about ticket sales - from what sections sell, to certain types of groups, to how holiday sales discounts are going.

Marolda, whose company was originally founded to sift through data for financial companies, declined to provide details about the Sox deal. But he said annual license fees for a team to use its Web-based software run from about $10,000 to $60,000, depending on how "many bells and whistles" a team wants in order to analyze data, he said.

The Sox may be thinking ahead when analyzing today’s ticket-sale trends.

But the team can immediately benefit in other ways, such as pinpointing how different areas of Red Sox Nation across New England respond to marketing efforts, based on ticket sales, Marolda said.

A sports team executive who uses the software can access real-time ticket-sale updates to see what tickets are selling and which ones are not and respond accordingly, Marolda said.

View the article at BostonHerald.com >>