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EMI brings the business advantages of SOAs center stage
We have all heard the predictions that service-oriented architectures (SOAs)
will become the dominant approach for implementing and maintaining networked
business systems. As early as 2006, according to many analysts.
We're already seeing SOAs change the IT landscape. In fact, some of the
companies we work with have begun garnering media attention for successful SOA
implementations. Clients like recording industry giant, EMI.
Before we get into the details of the EMI story, though, let's take a quick
step back.
SOAs offer a software infrastructure that can handle business needs today while
accommodating inevitable, unpredictable future requirements as you grow, meet
market demands, or counter competitors. Delivering on this promise comes down
to creating an architecture based on modeled services that can operate
independently of hardware requirements. Doing so allows you to concentrate on
creating business logic without having to worry about how the plumbing will
handle it.
From a management perspective, every time your company expands, streamlines a
process, or updates software, you no longer have to invest a Herculean effort
to get your systems up to speed.
Consider this advantage from a technical perspective. SOAs offer two
fundamental benefits. The first is the reuse of existing business logic by
abstracting it in a heterogeneous IT environment. The second is the ability to
compose those pieces of logic into new applications without rewriting
components that might break others. The abstraction and focus on business logic
makes your organization agile enough to respond to change without losing the
specificity needed for real business impact.
That all sounds good, but it might be a bit much to take in. Let's fast forward
to EMI where these concepts are already in play.
EMI is actually a conglomerate of many different recording labels, including
EMI Records, Virgin, Capitol, Blue Note, Angel, and Priority. Historically,
each label has employed its own team of New Media personnel to reach consumers
with online marketing. That meant that each label developed their own web
applications inside their own silo, instead of going to sister labels to avoid
duplicate efforts. Each label's website maintained core content for things like
artist bios, discographies and information on upcoming tours.
"We ended up with eight different Web hosting vendors and as many content
management applications, most with a single web server and single database
model," says Seth Brady, Director of Web Applications for EMI Music North
America. "The applications couldn't scale and some of the hosting vendors were
going out of business and falling apart around us."
Enter Service-Oriented Architecture and its myriad benefits. What started out
as a cost savings concept soon evolved into the creation of an innovative,
standardized technical platform that addressed larger challenges facing the New
Media teams. Challenges like finding a way to syndicate content like tour
information.
In its old model, EMI had several applications to manage tour dates. So, if you
went to three different sites, you might get three different tour dates. By
centralizing that content with one service, EMI could manage tour dates
accurately across multiple sites. Then they could easily syndicate that
information to sites EMI doesn't control, such as partners or fan sites.
And here's the best part. EMI can now use that information to drive consumers
back to the official artist and label sites. From there, EMI can engage
consumers in e-commerce opportunities, including albums, artist merchandise and
music downloads, targeted email campaigns, and other creative online marketing
opportunities. According to Brady, "Our New Media teams are now free to
innovate in their use of electronic media without being held back by technology
bottlenecks."
Seth Brady credits Avanade and Microsoft with helping to build EMI's
infrastructure, producing the model with which the music company developed its
Web services, and a fast, smooth implementation.
The Web services solution handles delivery of data to label and artist sites.
To obtain content, Web sites "call" the Web service application that has been
built on the .NET development platform and incorporates Avanade's ACA.NET
framework, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, and SQL Server 2000.
"The Avanade Connected Architecture (ACA) .NET framework was important to us,"
Brady said. "ACA gives developers standard features like security and caching
management that have been road tested by various clients under much more
rigorous conditions than we could effectively develop and test against.
Avanade's framework translated to less lines of code overall to manage and
easily saved us several months, getting us up and running in production in a
very short amount of time."
The ACA .NET suite of architectural tools includes services, code, best
practices and patterns built on top of the Microsoft .NET framework to make SOA
development easier to implement. The latest version adds the service generation
framework and an aspect-oriented architecture.
Together, EMI and Avanade have now developed 12 services, including news,
tours, consumer e-mail capture and artist discography.
And EMI is accomplishing its original goal - saving money. The first phase of
this project is estimated to have eliminated about 30% of the company's manual
data entry on websites. Over the next two years, EMI expects more savings from
continuing to consolidate its remaining hosting facilities down to a single
provider, shrinking hardware and administrative costs required to keep systems
patched and updated.
But EMI is also getting so much more bang for its SOA buck.
The centralized IT platform gives each New Media team the ability to focus on
marketing instead of serving as system administrators or data integrators.
When it comes to signing new artists for instance, the new web infrastructure
provides a strong competitive advantage. EMI labels can offer prospective
artists and their managers their own websites with reliable up-to-date content,
in addition to e-commerce opportunities for merchandise and downloads,
enterprise-level email capabilities, and reporting. Ultimately, it's a greater
opportunity for each artist to connect with consumers via the web, cell phone,
and PDA services.
And, since EMI's SOA can handle whatever updates come their way, their sites
are, in Brady's words, "future-proofed against major back-end changes we know
we'll make over time."
EMI has discovered what so many other companies soon will. SOAs provide a
strategic advantage when invested in appropriately and implemented properly.
Doing so frees you to serve customers and your business objectives instead of
remaining hamstrung by technology constraints.
About EMI:
EMI Music North America (N.A.) supports recorded music and distribution for
over 1,500 artists across North America in every genre, from jazz and pop to
Latin, Christian, country, and dance. Labels include Capitol Records, Virgin
Records America, EMI-Christian Music Group, Blue Note, Angel, and EMI Latin.
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