Music in the cloud provides new opportunities for tech companies

The digital music company X5 Music wanted to create a new environment for its digital music services. With more services in the cloud, they have both gained more time for development and reduced the need of support.

The Swedish music company X5 Music operates several digital music services. They developed much of the technology behind the services themselves, and as their success increased, so did the demands.

“The demands placed on us and our applications regarding availability and support became increasingly difficult for our small development team to manage,” says Klas Broman, CTO for X5 Music. “We needed help with support, monitoring and as creating a more uniform operating environment. This was the situation when we contacted Basefarm.

At the introductory meeting, Basefarm explained how they could help create a more secure environment in Azure (Microsoft’s public cloud) and how they could gradually take over support 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

“Basefarm had a great offer and they gained our trust right from the start,” says Klas.

Collaboration has now been underway for just over a year, and during this time, X5 Music with the assistance of Basefarm has transformed the services and simplified the solutions to such an extent that the need for Basefarm’s help with staffed monitoring has almost disappeared in favor of more automated solutions.

“With Basefarm’s help, we are now moving towards an environment that will probably no longer even need a support agreement because things so seldom go wrong,” says Klas. “But if the number of users further increases and the need arises again, we know that we have a good partner that will give us a helping hand.

“We’re very pleased with collaboration. Basefarm has helped us in using Azure in a good way. They’re at the leading edge, are proactive, honest and always suggest the optimal solutions based on our needs.”

Klas sees many benefits with the new way of working in the cloud.

“It’s given us completely new opportunities for managing production peaks, and because we only pay for the capacity used, we can handle the peak with considerable cost efficiency,” he says. “In addition, our team now has much more time to work with development instead of operations.”

On the question of what to expect in the future, Klas’ answer is long. “He mentions many new smart services and new technologies that will further streamline operations and increase the uniformity of the company’s various applications. And it is a foregone conclusion that Basefarm will be along as a partner and advisor even in the future.

“We maintain a constant dialog with Basefarm about different technology choices, about how we can evolve and improve,” he says. “And that feels good.”

During the course of the journey, Klas has also learned a lot and he’s happy to share it.

“If you’re moving applications to the cloud, it’s important to consider how to go about it in the best way. Some applications work relatively well as they are when moving them to the cloud, but many others require more or less significant changes to work smoothly. If you make these changes in a smart way, you’ll gain major benefits, both in performance and cost.”

4 benefits of using Azure:

Cost-efficient – You only pay for the capacity used.
Time-efficient – Frees more time for developing operations
Simple – You can scale up and down as needed
Increased performance – With more services in the cloud, you get more out of your services.

Want to know more about Microsoft Azure?

8 benefits you get from using a Microsoft tier 1 cloud solution provider (csp) for your azure consumption

The Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program enables partners to directly work with and manage the customers lifecycle. The CSP can directly provision, manage and support customers subscriptions. Basefarm is Tier 1 CSP Partner, meaning that we work directly with Microsoft and not through a CSP Distributor. A Tier 1 CSP needs to prove themselves with capabilities like handling support and cloud expertise.

Microsoft Azure

Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud platform. It allows for greater speed to market, by helping you build intelligent applications through open source technologies that are backed by integrated tools, from DevOps to serverless computing.