EMI Centralizes Online Marketing with Microsoft .NET-Based Web Services

EMI Centralizes Online Marketing with

Microsoft .NET-Based Web Services A New and Improved Web Infrastructure Standardizes Application Development, Supports Web Services-Based Content Delivery and Cuts Duplication of Effort and Costs CASE STUDY

A Web services-based application infrastructure built quickly on Microsoft .NET standardized and streamlined independent web development efforts supporting music labels’ online marketing initiatives, plus paved the way for driving down costs by consolidating hosting vendors. The project’s first phase cut manual data entry by over 30%, while standalone offerings from

website hosting providers are quickly being EMI is the world’s largest independent music company, operating directly in 50 countries. Its replaced with enterprise-level services from EMI Music division represents more than 1,000 artists spanning all musical tastes and genres. Its a single vendor. record labels include Angel, Astralwerks, Blue Note, Capitol, EMI Records, EMI Classics, EMI CMG, EMI Televisa Music, Manhattan, Mute, Virgin and Parlophone.

Industry Entertainment Solution Avanade helped EMI Avanade ACA®.NET Summary North America migrate Assets Avanade Development Geography North America various applications to Architecture Asset the Microsoft .NET ® Partnerships Avanade Framework Technology Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system; Size EMI has over 10 offices in ® Microsoft SQL Server; North America ® Microsoft Visual Stuidio .NET

Customer Background EMI North America

EMI is the world's largest independent music company, operating directly in 50 countries. Its EMI Music division represents more than 1,000 artists spanning all musical tastes and genres. Its record labels include Angel, Astralwerks, Blue Note, Capitol, EMI Records, EMI Classics, EMI CMG, EMI Televisa Music, Manhattan, Mute, Virgin and Parlophone.

Business Situation Recording labels’ web marketing initiatives were spread across multiple hosting providers and development teams, leading to duplication of some efforts

From jazz to pop to Christian, EMI Music N.A. is parent to a host of music labels, recording and distributing the works of more than 1,000 artists in every major genre throughout the US and Canada. “Avanade helped EMI North Each EMI N.A. recording label has its own dedicated New Media team, America realize our consolidated focused on online marketing and promotional efforts to support their artists. hosting and application Traditionally, these teams were not supported by corporate IT, and thus locally negotiated Web hosting arrangements for artists’ web sites plus architecture vision. Our long- developed their own applications. The independent label management standing relationship with structure created little opportunity or incentive to pool web marketing Avanade gave EMI the technology efforts or solutions. While this approach was manageable with small numbers of websites, it required considerable manual data confidence that we could work management resources to maintain core content such as artist news, together to find the best biographies, discographies, and tour dates. solution within our available Over time, these silos of effort and information became increasingly complex budget” and costly to support. Extracting customer information was often a difficult Mike Ballanco and time-consuming process, which was further constrained by limited Senior Vice President, IT resources. Consolidations in the hosting market also took its toll, resulting EMI Music N. A. in a rising number of website outages. In addition, the labels’ online marketing efforts were constrained by technology, which led to label and artist frustration.

Following a global corporate restructuring, EMI N.A.’s IT team was reorganized to directly support EMI’s labels. In 2004, IT embarked a strategic program to deliver cutting-edge web marketing capabilities plus consolidate website hosting for approximately 100 music label and artist sites.

An innovative, standardized application infrastructure was planned based on Microsoft’s .NET web services platform to syndicate content, and reduce manual data entry by site administrators. With IT actively managing a consolidated hosting and application environment, New Media teams at the labels were free to engage in innovative marketing campaigns without worrying about technology limitations.

The Solution Avanade’s Web services application infrastructure helped centralize EMI N.A. IT team’s web application development efforts

EMI N.A. had already developed a strategic roadmap of application capabilities,

but enlisted Avanade to help with the implementation. Avanade’s challenge ACA®.NET was two-fold: (1) build a Web services application infrastructure to speed the development process; and (2) ensure the new infrastructure properly Proven solutions are born of discipline, incorporated existing systems, and could also scale easily in the future for insight, and a passion for building robust and reliable operation. things right. Avanade delivers this Working closely with EMI N.A.’s Web Applications team, Avanade architected a advantage to its clients through a Web services solution that incorporated security, and a systems integration tool-set called the Avanade Connected framework. It was important to integrate with existing data sources to reduce Architecture® for .NET or ACA.NET. manual data entry. The new architecture enables content syndication from a Built by the industry’s leading scalable platform that’s designed to support future functions and services (e.g. technologists, these components trim XML web services developed on the Microsoft .NET development platform). hundreds of hours from standard EMI N.A. also leveraged the Avanade Connected Architecture for .NET project timelines. ACA.NET and the (ACA.NET) to cut development time for .NET-based applications such as logging Avanade Connected Methodologies and security. also reduce risk, create faster time-to- market, and provide greater Avanade also helped EMI architect a new hosting environment comprised of functionality. load-balanced, and fault-tolerant servers running Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. Avanade also worked closely with EMI’s new hosting vendor to help get the new highly scalable, and cost-effective environment up and running quickly to support future growth and new business opportunities.

Avanade value Avanade’s aggregate expertise and proven framework for application development secure the future of a bold IT program

EMI N.A.’s Web Services application infrastructure is a significant component of the IT organization’s move to formally support web-marketing efforts. Accordingly, Avanade helped EMI N.A. architect a scalable application “Because the EMI team had infrastructure capable of supporting future business opportunities such as expanded access to content, improved content management, transaction produced several Web services support, and real-time application integration of back-end systems. for internal artist and catalog

Complementing the EMI teams’ extensive hands-on experience, the Avanade data maintenance, they were team helped fast-track development with ACA.NET’s proven code and by quick to acquire greater insight leveraging best practices aggregated from Avanade development and expertise working with professionals’ work with its global customer base. The resulting Web services framework bore the hallmarks of high quality and consistency that Avanade on this project.” EMI had come to expect from its previous work with Avanade. Cliff Schenkhuizen Senior Infrastructure Architect Avanade, Inc.

Following phase I of the project, the impact of the new application platform earned the attention of senior IT executives from additional EMI territories, resulting in potential opportunities to expand this offering beyond North America.

Results Phase 1 of the Web service solution eliminated 30 percent of the manual data entry required for updated content plus consolidated some of EMI N.A.’s biggest hosting providers. EMI N.A. is now well positioned to continue its vendor consolidation program and further drive down administrative costs in supporting marketing efforts

By incorporating a central application infrastructure for Web services, the new IT platform enables EMI’s labels to focus their marketing efforts on innovative business opportunities rather than data and hosting management. The platform offers the labels and their artist’s better overall site reliability while simultaneously enabling IT development efforts to expand these capabilities to multiple business units. “With Avanade’s help, our New Media teams are now better EMI and Avanade’s solution helps transform music-related information into assets for new marketing and revenue opportunities. Content such as tour able to pursue innovative dates once posted manually on individual websites is now centrally managed marketing campaigns without and can easily be repurposed to support additional online marketing and being constrained by promotional opportunities.

technology. Their ACA.NET Finally, the new architecture helps EMI’s labels deploy new offerings more framework helped make the quickly, and take advantage of unique interactive marketing opportunities, which can be a competitive advantage when signing new artists. EMI’s new most of our development platform is able to keep artist’s websites up-to-date today, and future- resources and got us up and proofed for tomorrow so that new capabilities like e-commerce for artist running quickly.” merchandise, or digital downloads can be added. This assures talent and management that EMI has a reliable web presence than can scale effectively Seth Brady Senior Director, Web Applications to meet the needs of a growing artist. EMI Music N. A.

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