Imagem

Imagem Music Group is an independent music publisher based in Hilversum, the Netherlands. They acquire and manage the rights to classical, rock, jazz, and pop music.  The company’s mission is to be a global force in independent music publishing, and it relies on IT to support its growth-oriented model. With two IT staff and a data center that was running out of space, its U.K. division found it hard to provide the flexible, reliable, and timely services that employees required. Imagem needed a simple and flexible way for its small IT department to provision and manage its server infrastructure, reduce the risk of downtime, and support the rapidly growing business.

With two overstretched workers in its UK offices and after recently acquiring Boosey & Hawkes and Rodgers & Hammerstein, Imagem needed to improve its employee IT services and flexibility.  The UK staff were supporting 70 local employees, and 60 workers in the United States, Germany, France, and Holland.

“Managing and provisioning server computers were quite difficult and cumbersome, and consumed more time than our small IT staff could realistically handle,” said Paul Vernon, Head of IT for Imagem U.K. Group Services.

Managing the health of its servers was also problematic; Imagem had to examine the logs for each server separately. This onerous process resulted in important trends and pain points often going unnoticed until they caused problems. If a server experienced a critical issue, Vernon and his colleague had to notify users that service would be down while they fixed it.

Deploying new servers further drained IT resources. It took about two weeks to procure each computer—which costs around £6,000.

Something needed to be done to enhance productivity and Frontier Technology was on hand to provide the solution. We had worked with Vernon before at Boosey and Hawkes before the merger – based on the excellent service that was provided we were enlisted again. From examining Imagem’s infrastructure and growth plans, Frontier’s consultants recommended and installed System Center and Hyper-V.

“Imagem needed a good way to manage its server infrastructure. The fact that System Center includes a set of integrated, robust products for managing virtual machines, monitoring infrastructure health, and backing up data— at an attractive price point was compelling,” says Edwin Wong, Managing Director, Frontier Technology. “As Imagem grows its business, it will rely on Hyper-V as the foundation of a fully virtualised and dynamic IT infrastructure managed with System Center products.”

Frontier was also contracted to host the Boosey & Hawkes website, www.boosey.com, which runs on Hyper-V virtual machines running Windows Server 2003. “The Boosey website is a critical corporate presence and is highly valued within the classical music industry. We needed to ensure that it would run reliably and with great performance, and putting it on Hyper-V made this possible,” says Vernon.

The solutions – saving, time space and money

By using Microsoft virtualisation and management technologies, Imagem U.K. Group Services was able to substantially reduce their physical servers, saving space and money. The switch to virtualisation also helped to simplify and speed the way IT staff provision servers and configure disk space. The new solutions also improved availability of critical applications, and administered the environment.

Imagem estimates that it saves about £12,000 annually in computer spending by not having to purchase two new physical servers each year. The company has also realised savings in electricity costs because it does not need to power so many computers and can reduce the level of air conditioning required to cool the room. “Although we don’t have specific savings figures, it’s very clear that we’re consuming less power and, therefore, spending less money,” Vernon adds.

“I am really pleased with how the solution has worked. Frontier’s professionalism and willingness to go the extra mile in order to bring a project to completion to both parties’ satisfaction was very impressive. I would definitely recommend them to anyone seeking strong skills in the Microsoft infrastructure, network and server space.” Vernon concluded.

To read this case study in more detail on the Microsoft website please click here