Yesterday was a big day for Warner Music Group. Or rather, the public acknowledgment of big days that have been happening for months now. We announced a deal with Acquia to power our new artist website platform and are entering an exciting new stage of growth for our web properties. But more on that in a minute.
About a year ago it was announced that Cisco EOS, the website platform we at Atlantic Records used to build/manage artist websites was shutting its doors. The details of Cisco’s decision are no longer relevant, what matters is we needed a new home for almost 100 high traffic, feature rich artist websites. Each of us involved in the vetting process had a platform wish list – open source, Saas, a mature platform, robust developer community, rich feature set, scalability etc. and we looked at partner after partner trying to find the right fit. We’ve now launched nearly 70 artist websites on Enterprise Drupal Gardens and can confidently say we found an amazing new home for our artists.
The platform is based on Drupal 7, but ultimately the piece that really matters is OpenSaas. There are multiple amazing web platforms out there, but none of them allow us the mix of Saas, OpenSource and the rich feature set of Drupal. We get the benefit of a huge open source developer community, but have an amazing partner in Acquia vetting the core code and maintaining the platform for us. We don’t have the hassle of maintaining our own servers, but can export our own code at anytime and take it anywhere (it’s Drupal). Saas without vendor lock in. OpenSaas has also allowed our Acquia to iterate extremely quickly and anyone who knew Gardens just a few months ago will be blown away by the functionality of our newly launched websites, and we can’t wait to see where the platform takes us in the future.
I want to thank everyone on the Atlantic digital media team, the WEA D2C group, and the amazing team at Acquia for their tireless work over the last few months. It’s been inspiring to see so many smart people come together and push towards a common goal. In the following days I’ll be posting links to the new websites we have launched on the platform. In the meantime, take the tour of the platform, or read the official press release here.
--
Posted on: 03/20/2012
Comments