AWS Case Study: Appirio and ASCAP

From offices in the U.S. and Japan, Appirio serves a wide range of companies including Avago, Hamilton Beach, Japan Post Network, Ltd, Pfizer and Qualcomm. Appirio was founded in 2006 and is backed by Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital. Appirio worked closely with The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) to migrate their infrastructure to AWS.

Established in 1914, ASCAP is the first and leading U.S. Performing Rights Organization (PRO) representing the world’s largest repertory totaling over 8.5 million copyrighted musical works of every style and genre from nearly 350,000 songwriter, composer and music publisher members. The ASCAP repertory is represented in nearly every country around the world where copyright law exists. ASCAP protects the rights of its members and foreign affiliates by licensing the public performances of their copyrighted works and distributing royalties based upon surveyed performances. ASCAP is the only American PRO owned and governed by its writer and publisher members.

ASCAP relies on Salesforce.com to manage the business of licensing the public performances of music throughout the U.S. The complexities behind this process require a reliable, robust solution that easily integrates with existing workflow processes and billing systems. ASCAP looked to Appirio to help expand upon the native storage utility provided by Salesforce.com to create a more efficient process, with enhanced security and unlimited storage capacity. This solution would need to be seamless for the end user, and would reside within Salesforce.com. To recreate the end user experience of natively storing documentation in Salesforce.com, while maintaining maximum functionality and minimum investment, Appirio built a solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The solution consists of three elements:

• A user interface created on Salesforce.com
• A core application using AWS’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for resizable compute capacity
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to efficiently store documentation on a cloud platform

The Appirio solution fully encrypts each piece of data as it passes from the user to Amazon S3. Once there it is protected by the same strong security mechanisms Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

“The flexibility and scalability provided by Amazon Web Services give us the ability to have every needed detail of customer information within a mouse click for the appropriate employees in our organization while providing the strong security model we need for our business,” stated John Johnson, VP of Licensing, ASCAP.

Using AWS has allowed ASCAP to continue to rely on Salesforce.com for managing its core business, while retaining the flexibility to expand and enhance functionality at will to meet key business needs. ASCAP currently has over 90GB of company data stored in Amazon S3, and each data object is directly associated to key Salesforce.com records for easy retrieval. ASCAP has relied on this functionality for online data storage since June 2008. ASCAP is based in New York, New York. To learn more, go to http://www.ascap.com

Appirio is based in San Mateo, California and also has offices in Japan. To learn more, go to http://www.appirio.com/ .