As the largest direct marketer of DVDs in the United States and Canada, BMG Columbia House has extremely dynamic needs around IT to support its continually refreshed marketing activities, numerous sales campaigns and client fulfillment programs. The company chose Atos Origin for our flexible utility computing solution that meets the needs of fluctuating demands resulting from promotions and seasonal sales.
The Columbia House DVD Club was launched in 1997 and has become the largest direct marketer of DVDs in the United States and Canada. The Columbia House DVD Club offers over 10,000 titles including today’s biggest blockbusters as well as must-have classics from most of the major movie studios. The Club features the latest releases the same day they are available in stores and offers members the convenience of purchasing through magazines or online.
Columbia House is a part of BMG Columbia House, Inc., the world’s largest direct-to-customer distributor of music and movies. The company’s brands include BMG Music Service, Columbia House, and cdnow.com.
Business Challenges
BMG Columbia House has widely fluctuating needs for computing power that swing in response to a continuous refresh of marketing activities, implementation of sales campaigns and the resulting fulfillment of orders from clients.
The flexibility we offer with utility-based computing allows BMG Columbia House to pay only for capacity that it is using. This brings immediate benefits to BMG Columbia House for the fluctuations around sales and marketing, and important in the future as the company plans to migrate to open systems architecture.
Our Solution
BMG Columbia House selected Atos Origin for Managed Operations of its mainframe-processing environment using the utility computing model.
Atos Origin provides database administration, network management and outsourcing services that include the following activities:
- Data center management
- Standards and procedures
- System software migration
- System hardware and software maintenance
- Technical support
- System tuning
- Batch production processing and scheduling
- Problem management
- Change management
- Performance management
- Capacity management
- Batch test processing
- Problem diagnosis and resolution
- Service level monitoring
- Evaluation, installation, testing
- System programming support
The Atos Origin solution runs the current BMG Columbia House environment and also facilitates continuous process and cost improvements through our Business Transformation Methodology. Atos Origin relocated the BMG Columbia House IT environment to the Atos Origin data center in Arlington, Texas, and is currently working with the company to explore options for further cost reductions through Business Process Optimization, Application Rationalization and Infrastructure Consolidation.
Through Business Process Optimization, Atos Origin worked jointly with the BMG Columbia House business managers to identify areas to improve business processes and develop a plan for optimization. These activities include standardizing processes across functional areas and automating non-integrated processes. We have also proposed working with the company for Application Rationalization. This process examines the overall application landscape. The Application Rationalization phase leads to Infrastructure Consolidation where applicable, to help further reduce operational expense.
The Results
Atos Origin was able to significantly reduce the overall operating expense for BMG Columbia House through our utility computing solution while delivering best practices and processes to BMG Columbia House. The solution provides BMG Columbia House with the flexibility to migrate to open systems in the most cost-effective way. This is all addressed through a hardware refresh, server consolidation, utility-based computing, and storage on-demand solutions. In addition to the flexibility, BMG Columbia House can reinvest cost savings in technology refresh to the new platforms.