Sony Entertainment Television, India: Get, SET, Go

Sony, which is almost a decade old, initially faced problems like scarcity of
functional and domain experts, constantly evolving and changing business models
and issues that any new business would grapple with. Not to forget the fact that
as a new channel in the block, it also had an uphill task of setting up the
processes and making sure that they evolve with the organization.

Given such a scenario, the organization decided to go for a captive IT set
up, which enabled it to quickly map business and process changes into the system
by eliminating resource intensive activities typically associated with an
external or outsourced vendor. Simultaneously, the company ramped up its IT
infrastructure and facilities.

SAMBA, an in-house ERP system, was developed eight years back and has modules
for ad sales management, music capsule sales management, accounting, budget
administration and control, invoicing, A/R, A/P, program scheduling and
tracking, and content rights management. It was a complete sub-system for Pay
TV/subscription business, which included sales, billing, A/R, invoicing, A/P,
accounting etc. Having a common development platform and interdependent modules
has lead to a complete integration of business application at Sony Entertainment
Television (SET).

With increase in the number of TV channels and a fluid business landscape,
SAMBA needed a quick and long term fix. “SAMBA is not fully equipped to handle
all issues as we are now gearing up for challenging times in the broadcast
environment,” says Nitin Aurora, company's vice president and head, Business
IT. SAMBA, nevertheless, would remain the application backbone of SET India
& SET Discovery.

SET intended to put in place standardized IT solutions to draw maximum
business impact. SAP-FI/CO/BIW modules, one of the major IT implementation
projects at SET, is underway. The company is implementing SAP on Sun Niagara
servers, Solaris 10 and Oracle 9i. “We are integrating SAP with SAMBA and
WEBSMS. The applications will be exchanging data in a batch and real-time
mode,” adds Aurora

Keeping up with implementing high tech enterprise solutions, two years back
SET also initiated WebSMS. The solution is evolving with nearly 50% operations
already web-enabled and live for over 12 months.

The next phase of the project helped them track and reconcile the movement of
their IRD (set top box) boxes, worth Rs 40 crore. This has also been solved
using WebSMS. The project is based on a typical three-tier architecture based on
Lamp- Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/ PHP.

The company is also in the process of implementing Phase III of web enabling
of SET Discovery operations, being done on LAMP, recognized for providing a
shift towards quicker development and more robust, fast executing browser based
computing.

 Sony is carrying out automating
sales orders data captures using XML and EDI concepts, again is an extension to
their own ERP called SAMBA. Almost 65-75% of company's data is now automated.

Some of the other IT implementations include: Lotus Notes for messaging,
including extension of the same on blackberry and Hutchmail; an intranet for
'employee exclusive contents' and portals hosted out of India and the US;
and SAN and NAS deployments, a must for any organization like Sony where content
is business and requires very high storage capacity, separate from computational
requirements.

Team DQ

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in