Connecting thousands of visitors across HOTA, Home of the Arts

HOTA, Home of the Arts is the Gold Coast’s contemporary cultural precinct nestled amongst sub-tropical parklands and just a stone’s throw from Surfers Paradise.

The latest stage of the precinct development opened in early 2021 featuring a brand new $63 million art gallery that complements existing cinemas, cafes and retail outlets, along with an award-winning outdoor stage, showcasing the very best local, national and international artists.

HOTA, Home of the Arts was forging ahead with a suite of major infrastructure work as part of a 10-year plan and were not only looking for the right IT hardware and systems – but also support with strategic thinking required to future proof their venues and challenge the status quo in the Arts Tourism sector. In 2016, Veracity was appointed to lead the transformation of its ICT platform. We understood that all eyes would be on HOTA, Home of the Arts as they opened a new gallery space in early 2021, and it was important for them to have a trusted partner by their side to ensure that connectivity for staff and visitors across venues was reliable, seamless and exceeded expectations.

Veracity worked with HOTA, Home of the Arts to conduct an ICT Health Check. Next came the development of a Three Year ICT Roadmap to design and implement an IT platform that would power their state-of-the-art facilities and integrate effortlessly across venues. We designed infrastructure to support cloud-hosted applications to facilitate access anywhere and anytime, because we believe work is a thing you do, not a place you go. This gave HOTA, Home of the Arts staff freedom to work flexibly without being tied to a physical work space.

HOTA’s new outdoor stage and entertainment area challenged us to think beyond supporting just the ICT requirements of a building to a whole-of-precinct approach and visitor experience. Within this HOTA ‘digital dome’, we made it possible for patrons to connect wherever they are in the precinct to book tickets, see what’s on, secure a BBQ location or even pay for food and beverage during an event.

The implementation was a great success, and now that the precinct is up and running, Veracity continues to provide remote and face-to-face IT support services to HOTA, 24 hour a day, 7 days a week. Continuing a successful eight-year partnership with HOTA, recently we were selected to integrate five disparate ICT platforms into a single IT platform with the formation of Experience Gold Coast (EGC), which now amalgamates HOTA and four other entities under the EGC umbrella.