AWS Case Study: Hungama Digital Media Entertainment

When Mr. Manan Chhatrapati joined Hungama in 2008, as Chief Technology Officer for Digital Business, he brought a new perspective to the organization by formulating a cloud strategy. Hungama Digital Media Entertainment turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide the cloud computing solution.

Before switching to AWS, Hungama purchased its own servers and installed the servers in local data centers, which was a very expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient system. When the company needed quick turnaround of projects, the old models caused delays in implementation, adversely affecting the time-to-market. It was definitely time for a change.

The AWS solution offered flexible pricing options that gave Hungama enough choices to cover their unique requirements. As a content provider and aggregator, Hungama requires enormous amounts of storage. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides an affordable, cost-effective, and secure option for storage. The flexibility of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the “pay for what you use” billing model is a tremendous advantage for the company. As Mr. Chhatrapati explains, “we only pay for what we use, with no up-front [cost] commitment. We love the fact that we can shed resources as quickly as we wish, free up engineering resources from the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running our own infrastructure.” Hungama also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for development.

Although Hungama Digital Media Entertainment has gained numerous benefits from the AWS cloud computing solution, Mr. Chhatrapati feels that the top three benefits are cost effectiveness, flexibility, and fast time to market.

The cost savings resulting from cloud computing allows Hungama to use its resources to grow the company, which is a crucial competitive advantage. Mr. Chhatrapati enthuses that “Hungama’s IT infrastructure management has been simplified and our cost savings have been close to 50%.” He goes on to say that “AWS has, in fact, lowered their prices several times over the last few years and we love the savings!”

The flexibility of the AWS solution enables the Bollywood movie maker to develop applications on numerous platforms or programming models. The AWS flexibility, combined with the technical staff’s expertise in Java, PHP, .NET, Oracle, MySQL, and SQL technologies, is a very powerful development tool.

By outsourcing its server and storage management to AWS, the company can concentrate on getting projects to the market faster. Mr. Chhatrapati explains that “AWS enables us to accelerate our innovation process and speed-to-market in rolling out our services worldwide. The flexibility to scale both up and down, and not sit on unneeded, excess capacity at any time has really enabled us to cater to the sudden spurts in business in a timely fashion.”

The Amazon solution is clearly working for Hungama Digital Media Entertainment. The company has migrated about 80% of its infrastructure to the cloud and plans to extend its use of cloud computing. Going forward, Hungama expects to use the AWS cloud platform to meet its disaster recovery requirements. After all, who can argue with 50% cost savings?

http://www.hungama.com/