Queue-it Ensures Reliable Experiences During Peak Demand

Queue-it offers leading virtual waiting room services that empower organizations to control and capitalize on website and app traffic surges. Its powerful SaaS platform has enabled online ticket vendors, ecommerce companies, educational institutions, and public sector agencies worldwide to ensure online fairness for over 75 billion consumer interactions during high-demand situations. With edge computing, Queue-it improves the experience for its customers by offloading complex logic from their applications and globally scaling its first-come, first-served system.

When traffic surges because of promotions, announcements, or another event, it’s an opportunity to drive business or serve constituents. But that opportunity can turn into a curse if the website or application crashes or performs poorly. Rather than see visitors abandon out of frustration, organizations can ensure a fair, transparent experience for all through Queue-it’s cloud-based virtual waiting room.

Offering the first SaaS virtual waiting room to prevent web and app crashes due to high traffic, Queue-it is expert at peak management. During times of high demand, when websites and apps are pushed to their limit, Queue-it places visitors in a waiting room based on preset parameters such as traffic load, website/app capacity, and user behavior. While in queue, visitors can monitor their position and estimated wait time. In a first-come, first-served order, they are redirected to the site or app once they can seamlessly continue their online journey.

As Queue-it Co-Founder and CPO Martin Pronk explained, “Organizations spend years building brand trust. As part of that, it’s essential that they provide the same fair and transparent experience online as they do in their physical spaces.”

With a vision to be the world’s preferred solution for queue management, Queue-it found it natural to partner with Akamai. As Pronk said, Akamai is a world leader in edge computing, and many of the world’s largest organizations and biggest brands trust Akamai to secure and deliver their digital experiences.

“These organizations see huge traffic volumes and spikes. By using Akamai EdgeWorkers, we enable our mutual customers to easily take advantage of our solution and the benefits of edge computing,” Pronk continued.

In just one hour, Queue-it customers can easily integrate with Akamai via Queue-it’s EdgeWorkers Connector. This easily deployable code at the edge eliminates the need for organizations to touch their code base — a particularly attractive option for any organization with complex systems.

Since Queue-it launched its EdgeWorkers Connector in 2021, traffic has been growing. Now, over 750 million site and app visitors are served via billions of EdgeWorkers invocations every month. Simultaneously, Queue-it customers have controlled traffic of 100,000+ requests per minute.

“Akamai EdgeWorkers helps us provide a simple solution to support a range of complex situations,” said Pronk. It also frees Queue-it’s developers from involvement in customer integrations. “Our support team can use the intuitive solution to help as needed with integrations,” Pronk continued.

Queue-it benefited from EdgeWorkers in other ways. It can easily and accurately determine when someone should be directed to its waiting room. It can also execute complex logic at the edge, such as to determine whether someone is an everyday visitor or a VIP.

Handling complex logic in this way would be impossible if Queue-it used other client-side integration options. “It’s too easy for someone to manipulate client-side code. But it’s very complex to deploy such logic on the server side. We can offload that complexity with EdgeWorkers and make that decision at the edge rather than put that load on our customers’ infrastructure,” said Pronk.

At the same time, Queue-it customers saw a huge performance boost. “Connecting at Akamai’s edge shields back-end servers from traffic requests, which helps deliver improved and more reliable performance on the most business-critical days,” Pronk added.

Queue-it can also easily tap into the security layers provided by Akamai’s network architecture, filtering out bots and credential abusers before they hit the waiting room. “Akamai helps us further ensure a fair user journey. Everyone is equal until a sale starts or registration is available — and the bots have no access or insights. Even tech-savvy visitors can’t intercept or manipulate EdgeWorkers code to skip the online queue,” said Pronk.

Such advanced capabilities perfectly align with Queue-it’s vision to evolve from peak management to traffic management. As Pronk explained, more organizations see peak traffic as an opportunity rather than a technical problem or threat. And Queue-it is empowering them to capitalize on those opportunities.

Since playing a critical role helping governments and healthcare providers allocate COVID-19 vaccines in a fair, controlled manner, the EdgeWorkers Connector has enabled numerous brands to fully capitalize on their promotions.

“We partnered with Akamai and a leading company to help with the brand’s 2024 Super Bowl promotion. The brand had a short time frame to protect a complex infrastructure, and gained peace of mind knowing its web pages were available even in the face of a highly successful campaign,” Pronk continued.

Now Queue-it is enabling organizations to better understand and establish meaningful relationships with their site and app visitors. “Instead of just offering a one-time discount, they can offer the types of loyalty programs and exclusivity that keeps people coming back for more,” he concluded.

Queue-it is the leading developer of virtual waiting room services to control website and app traffic surges by offloading visitors to a waiting room. Its powerful SaaS platform enables online ticket vendors, ecommerce companies, educational institutions, and public-sector services around the globe to keep their systems online and visitors informed, capturing key sales and online activity on their most business-critical days. The use of Queue-it has ensured online fairness during high-demand situations for billions of consumers worldwide. The company is headquartered in Denmark, and has offices in the United States, South Korea, and Australia. Learn more at queue-it.com.