According to the company, the Heineken.nl website is a portal that not only provides information in the form of a comprehensive musical and sports agenda, but also features a web shop where visitors can reserve and purchase various extras, including music downloads and tickets to sold-out concerts — and use the site's so-called Heineken "e's" platform–exclusive currency to pay for those special offers.
With the LeaseWeb solution, several VMware Virtual Machines provide the necessary hardware-based servers for the new site, as well as network equipment; such as a firewall and a load balancer.
"Our engineers have extensive knowledge of VMware, and will — where necessary — provide support to Heineken with regard to maintenance and/or supplements to the existing web environment," Ruud Mous, sales director of LeaseWeb, said.
According to LeaseWeb, its hosting network ensures that consumers can make unlimited use of the Heineken.nl website, offering more than 750 Gigabits per second of bandwidth, benefitting websites with heavy traffic, multimedia applications and/or streaming video — such as the new Heineken.nl site.
"Virtual hosting is particularly attractive to the enterprise market and the higher segment of the small and medium-sized business sector," Mous added. "A corporate hosting environment such as Heineken.nl, in particular, benefits from a virtualized solution compared to a purely hardware-based solution. Examples of such benefits include scalability and availability. It also makes migrations much simpler, and it does not affect the applications."
Heineken.nl's download shop reportedly offers more than 2,500 CDs and 650 DVDs, with more than 500 downloads also available. There is a web shop offering Heineken branded merchandise, such as clothing, beer glasses, bags and wristwatches; as well as a ticket shop operated in collaboration with Ticket Online, where visitors can order tickets for various events.
According to a LeaseWeb release, the Heineken.nl website allows consumers to pay with a Heineken E-Card, a full-fledged VISA credit card specially designed and customized for Heineken; and can also use the E-Card to save "e's" — making this the payment and savings method at Heineken.nl. This system allows each purchase using the Heineken E-Card to collect "e's" that make the buyer eligible for a variety of special offers.
"The primary objective of Heineken.nl is not to sell more beer, but rather to encourage our customers to feel even more strongly connected to the brand by offering them tangible benefits, priority and privileges, in order to make their night out even more enjoyable," Heineken.nl Marketing Director Herwin van den Berg added.