World's Largest Music Company Selects Sunopsis

Universal Music Group (UMG) the global music company and unit of media giant Vivendi, has installed Sunopsis data integration software into its business.

Universal Music Germany, the German subsidiary of UMG, operates a number of complex IT systems to effectively manage their sales, customers, products and inventory. While some of these systems are operated directly in Berlin (Germany), some other systems are hosted by the group's central IT in Fishers, Indiana (US).

Ernst Röntgen, Director of Application Development for Universal Music Germany, explains: "The systems we need to interact with include OS/390 and AS/400 servers, RDBMS such as Oracle and SQL Server, as well as a JD Edwards ERP and a number of various files. Furthermore, the latency of our integration processes range from nightly batches to near-real-time updates. Our manually written scripts could no longer cope with such demands as the business is changing fast and we have to keep track with it."

After analyzing several solutions available on the market, Universal Music Germany chose Sunopsis Data Conductor as its data integration solution. Ernst Röntgen comments: "Integration processes are at the core of our business, and their reliability is essential to the continuity of our operations. For example, several of these processes work deep inside our order processing system. We had thus to choose a solution that not only addressed our technical requirements, but would also scale easily with our needs and operate reliably, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week."

Sunopsis Data Conductor was initially deployed for the loading of the sales data warehouse, which involves a mix of nightly batch loads from the ERP and other international databases. It is also providing 30-minute-interval refreshes from the invoice routing tool. A dashboard was also implemented on top of this data warehouse, presenting most notably the sales orders and the customer profits and losses up to the previous day.

"The ramp-up time was very short," remembers Ernst Röntgen. "Sunopsis Data Conductor is very easy to learn, and the productivity of the design and development phases is very high. With Sunopsis Data Conductor, we have cut our implementation times by 60%."

This productivity gain is due mostly to the business rules driven approach used by Sunopsis Data Conductor, which clearly insulates the business rules from the actual implementation and allows designers and developers to focus on what they want to achieve, leaving the actual implementation task to Sunopsis Data Conductor's automated native code generation. "The business rules approach also facilitates greatly the maintenance of the integration processes," confirms Ernst Röntgen.

After the initial project that was successfully designed and deployed in less than 4 months, Universal Music Germany is expanding the use of Sunopsis Data Conductor to other areas. "We are actually starting another inter-application integration project, which will exchange data several times a day between the ERP and our sales operating systems. And other projects will follow closely as the demands for fast data processing are rising," concludes Ernst Röntgen.