Software Quarterly

Notes Heard Round the World


At Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America -- with 5,000 IT users worldwide, 2,000 of whom are in North America -- Lotus Notes is helping everyone sing from the same page.
Rick Schwartz
Vice President of Networks and Technology
Sony Music Corporation

With annual revenues of $5 billion, Sony's recorded music division competes in a marketplace so feverish that it needs minute-by-minute information on business trends and on its assembly of talent, a list of stars ranging from Tony Bennett to Pearl Jam. The Sony division must react quickly to market conditions in the countries where it operates.

The company must plan new product releases on a worldwide basis, while maintaining the flow of critical information to its executives, who are often in transit. And like any business, it needs to be as streamlined and cost-effective as possible.

Rick Schwartz, vice president of networks and technology at Sony Music Entertainment, had to find an answer that fit these requirements while helping improve the way the company does business. "Our mainframe architecture wasn't satisfying our growing information needs, which include a global framework for the transfer of timely marketing and financial reports." says Schwartz. "But the music industry has traditionally lagged other industries in adopting client/server technologies."

Lotus Notes@Work for Sony Music

Lotus Notes @ Work for Sony Music
(3.6 MB QuickTime)

Sony Music Entertainment adopted Lotus Notes because it needed a single client/server platform to build, store, view, and distribute the information. Another reason for choosing Notes: the Sony division needed a solution that would provide the capability to bundle multimedia objects and serve as a robust development environment that could be changed at the drop of a CD.

One of the first Notes applications developed was a global marketing system to track the results of shipments and retail sales, and the important Billboard magazine charts. "The ability to track and manage this kind of information didn't exist before Notes," says Schwartz.

"Now, international approvals are received five times faster, and information travels global time zones seamlessly," Schwartz explains, adding that programmer productivity has improved by a factor of eight for simple databases and reports.


See also:
Getting Connected With John Patrick
An Interview With Dr. Internet

Photo: Peter Hamblin for SQ









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