People looking to purchase licensed music, and music authors looking to sell their music, both require a trusted intermediary to bring them together. We provide that critical function in Germany. GEMA (In English, the acronym stands for the Society for Musical Performing and Mechanical Reproduction Rights), the largest performing rights organization in Germany, serves over 3,000 full members, over 6,000 limited members, and over 50,000 associated music authors.
But because we are not the only collecting society for the performing arts in Germany, every day we must earn our members’ trust. This means providing the latest information about licensed works and providing our members with a rich set of online services that keep them engaged.
Recently, we developed a mobile app with links to the works in the GEMA database, but our initial results were discouraging: It was taking an average of 40 seconds for the app to respond to a simple test search. This would not be an acceptable response time for today’s mobile users, so we took a critical look at our data infrastructure.
Latency in the Middleware
In our infrastructure, a layer of middleware used web services to collect and integrate data from a variety of different databases. Certain processes, such as delivering new online services, used to take us several months, and we suspected that if we could increase the speed of our data integration process, we might be able to accelerate our development cycles while also improving the response times of our mobile app.
A Dramatic Speed Boost
We implemented the Denodo Platform as an extension of our middleware. As such, the Denodo Platform took over the middleware’s data integration functions, and this made a significant difference.
After implementing the Denodo Platform, the mobile app was able to respond to the test search in an average of 200 milliseconds, an acceptable response rate for our users. Also, online products that used to take us months to deliver now take us just a few days. I could even perform some programming tasks myself in one or two hours.
Moving Forward
In addition to its performance, the Denodo Platform was incredibly easy to install and set up. To me, it felt more like configuring a tool than “programing” it. In the future, we plan on using the Denodo Platform to assist in data governance, since it provides a single layer for accessing all the data sources, and we also plan on using it to connect with a wider range of databases, including some NoSQL data sources.
I had the opportunity to tell GEMA’s data virtualization story in the video below. If you have similar challenges collecting data in a timely fashion, you would do well to consider data virtualization for your organization.
To learn more about how companies are leveraging data virtualization across numerous industries, see the collection of Denodo case studies.
- GEMA Gains a Dramatic Speed Boost with the Denodo Platform - May 29, 2019