Background:
Every second of the day, tens of thousands of songs begin to play in every corner of the world, creating trillions of performance transactions each year. Most songs have multiple rights owners of composers, writers, lyricists, and publishers, each with their specific complex ownership percentages, payment instructions, and tax distribution details.
A Performance Rights Organization (PRO) owned and run by its members is the world leader in performance royalties. The Company licenses songs & scores to the businesses that play them publicly. They distribute the money as royalties and use cutting-edge technology to process over one trillion performances every year, more than any PRO in the world.
Challenge:
The rise in digital consumption places tremendous strain on the Company’s data center with finite processing capacity. The ever-increasing complexity of performance rights licensing, rapid digital transformation, diversification of distribution channels, proliferation of intermediaries, and disruptions from new competitors propelled the Company to embark on their cloud journey to achieve necessary agility, scalability, and economy.
The Company needed a capable trusted partner to help them navigate the increased complexity of performance rights licensing, rapid digital transformation, diversification of distribution channels, proliferation of intermediaries, and disruption of new competitors. To be truly successful in their mission, the Company must also succeed in advancing their agile development processes, modern cloud architecture, development techniques, continuous integration continuous delivery tooling, robust security-first mindset, automated testing, strong cloud economics, and a sophisticated DevOps culture.
Solution:
In March 2017, Converge worked with the Company to build a “Cloud-Native Matching Engine” proof of technology (PoT). This produced an impressive Python application, showcasing the enormous potential of AWS.
In September 2017, Converge kicked off the successful development of the Company’s first cloud-native International Distribution Application (IDA) to process hundreds of millions of payment records for $300M+ of revenue from around the world.
With these and other successes, Converge completed an Enterprise Cloud Advisory and Migration Strategy Project with recommendations approved by the Company’s Board to adopt the All-In-Cloud strategy. This began a three-year effort to completely leave their data centers.
In 2019 and 2020, we helped revitalize the agile application development processes at the Company and led many AWS-native application development projects, including: Online Member Enrollment; Cloud-Based Payment Gateway; Cue Sheet Processing System; Enterprise Authentication, Authorization, & Auditing with AWS Cognito; Enterprise ElasticSearch Services; Member Access Portal Modernization WebSphere WAS to AWS; Enterprise DevOps Center of Excellence & Platform Engineering; and QA Automated Testing.
The Company completed its All-In-Cloud journey on schedule in 2021.
Results:
The Company found the right partner in Converge as they embarked on their digital transformation. Their goal was not only to migrate to the cloud, but also to build modern AWS-native applications. They are succeeding in advancing their agile development processes, modern development techniques, continuous integration/deployment tooling, advanced security, automated testing, strong cloud economics, and sophisticated DevOps culture. As a consulting service provider, Converge has become a trusted advisor for the Company.
