.IE transitions to CIRA Registry Platform

.IE says the new system is better but registrars report frustration.

Ireland’s country code domain name is a bit Canadian now: It has transitioned to the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA)’s registry platform.  .IE transitioned its over 300,000 domains under management to the platform.

Both CIRA and .IE hailed the transition as a success. Two registrars I spoke with said it wasn’t so smooth and continues to cause headaches. The transition had over 24 hours of downtime, and registrars must now manage three systems for .IE domain names, they told Domain Name Wire.

.IE CEO David Curtin dismissed these complaints, arguing that the three programs are an improvement over the old system:

We now have TITAN (essentially .ca’s FURY customised for the .ie namespace), which is integrated via an API with Deskpro (a best-of-breed ticketing application), and which has an API to the CRO, the national companies registration office (for corporate contact validation). EPP is part of TITAN/FURY, so I would not call that a 3^rd system.

It’s true to say that we had an integrated registry management system before, called Core Registry System (CRS). This had integrated ticketing and a web-based portal. However, we also had a proprietary IE-API and we used email for contact validation. As .ie is a Managed Registry, all new registrations are checked for a Connection to Ireland before being registered. This process was entirely manual, including checking with the CRO. In recent years, the CRS platform had been extensively modified and extended to cater for GDPR, .ie policy liberalisation and secondary market.  The underlying platform however was approaching end of life.

He also shifted some of the blame to registrars for not preparing:

As you would expect with a project of this scale and complexity, Registrars will need some time to become familiar with Deskpro and with TITAN. Those Registrars who prepared diligently, have adopted very quickly indeed, and required only modest support post go-live. Some Registrars who didn’t read our email Comms or FAQs, and who didn’t watch our video tutorials or webinars, or didn’t engage with the technical preview phase (six months out from go live) or use the OT&E environment for testing, have naturally struggled in the first few days after go-live.

What’s clear is that changing registry systems can be a pain for registrars, as evidenced by the list of the things Curtin said some registrars didn’t do.

Curtin says that .IE support tickets have trickled down to negligible levels as registrars get used to the new platform.