The digitalisation of the music market through streaming services has led to an exponential growth of data. Accurately billing music services and paying creator royalties requires the processing of huge volumes of data.
In 2018, ICE GmbH, a joint venture of three national European collecting societies for music rights, was faced with the challenge of establishing a future-proof infrastructure to manage growing data volumes. ICE's core application for the online business "Licensing Online" (short: LION) had to be provided on a high-performance and scalable platform. Robotron, a specialist in the management of large data volumes, was commissioned as a partner for this migration project and together, ICE and Robotron set the course for a future-proof, hybrid infrastructure.
The development towards a hybrid infrastructure:
As a first step LION had to be migrated from a Vmware-based legacy environment to Oracle's Exadata. The resulting additional dynamics of the project ensured further data growth, so the scalability of Exadata was proved for the first time.
ICE has subsequently grown its customer base and expanded into new territories.. In order to provide own environments for test and development purposes of new customers the demand for development and acceptance test systems as a copy of the productive environment increased. These environments are subject to dynamic demand and must be available at short notice. In order to keep the costs low for system capacities in peak loads (storage, memory, CPU), the flexibility of the Oracle Cloud was chosen for this project. Due to the same technological basis of Oracle Cloud and the on premises environment, specific technological features as well as a very good comparability of these environments are available.
After almost 3.5 years of productive Exadata Cloud operation and 2.5 years of Exadata Cloud Service, ICE can reflect on several successful projects with Specialised Engineered Systems. The ICE Robotron partnership has been vital to securing creators’ income digital music services now and in the future.
Learn more: Oracle Blog Post
About ICE
ICE offers a flexible suite of services for Publishers, Collective Management Organisations (CMOs) and Rightsholders. Services include: copyright administration, multi-territorial online licensing processing and Digital Service Provider (DSP) licensing solutions. ICE was created by PRS for Music, STIM and GEMA and represents over 330,000 rightsholders alone through this partnership. In addition the ICE Core includes repertoire of IMRO and the independent publishers Peermusic, Downtown/Songtrust and Concord. ICE has processed trillions of online music uses from music streaming services and paid over €1.6 billion back to rightsholders since March 2016. The ICE copyright database holds over 39 million musical works. ICE is based in the UK, Germany and Sweden.
Oracle & Robotron: A strong partnership
The partnership between the Saxon company and Oracle has been existing since the founding years of Robotron. From the very beginning, Robotron has always had high partner levels with Oracle in the market and as one of the first partners in Germany, Robotron was finally certified as a "Platinum Partner". Since then, Robotron has consistently met the relevant requirements and was one of the first partners to take the step into the new cloud oriented partner programm OPN2020.
As the largest German training centre for Oracle technologies, Robotron conducts the original-trainer-led courses of Oracle University in its training center in Dresden, online or directly at the customer's site. For more than 20 years the Robotron training centre has been a competent partner of ORACLE Deutschland B.V. & Co. KG. The Robotron training centre has been offering training and further education on topics related to the Oracle database.