Hungama Halves Infrastructure Mgmt Cost With Cloud

It was raining success for Hungama Digital Media (HDM), one of India’s largest aggregator, developer, publisher and distributor of Bollywood and South-Asian entertainment content. However, the fact that the IT infrastructure didn’t support the company’s colossal vision of growth and expansion was a dampener, until the company found its answer in moving to the cloud.

The Challenge

Managing over 2,000 mobile and digital campaigns for almost 300 brands globally, HDM was growing at a fast pace. This required the company to scale up its IT infrastructure within quick turnaround time. Technology obsolescence high costs and turnaround time were among the key issues that Manan Chhatrapati, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of HDM and his team were facing.

Prior to moving to the cloud, the company would purchase servers and install them in local datacentres, which was an expensive proposition. Moreover, the process of purchasing consumed a lot of time. HDM was looking at quick turnarounds for projects, and this old model was causing delays in implementation which affected the time-to-market. Additionally, the cost of storing content was expensive. “Very often, due to the dynamic business needs, the same servers were deemed obsolete leading to the challenge of re-deployment or disposal of the assets. Other challenges we faced were around security, hardware failures and SLA compliance,” adds Chhatrapati.

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As the CTO, Chhatrapati’s primary objective was to provide a cost efficient hosting environment for the large amount of digital content that HDM owns, as well as an assured service with appropriate budget to support the business.

Leap Of Faith

Migrating to the cloud in 2008, today HDM has almost 80% of its infrastructure on the cloud. After evaluating various hosting options the Amazon cloud was selected for it scalability, cost efficiency and reliability. AWS’ comprehensive suite of infrastructure web services was selected as building blocks for the development of the company’s SaaS.

The cloud project commenced in April 2008 with training the IT team for a focused shift to the cloud services offered by Amazon Web Services. In May 2008, tools were set up for easy upload of applications and content. This was followed by architecting and redesigning the applications for seamless adaptation to the cloud environment. The entire architecture of applications was completely refurbished into the cloud environment.

By June 2008, HDM migrated to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform and transferred content to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). The services used on the AWS cloud include - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). “We use the cloud elaborately for our storage needs and hosting services and today we serve most of our content off the cloud,” explains Chhatrapati. Hungama is continuously adding multiple digital properties in the AWS cloud.

CAPEX Gives Way To OPEX

According to Chhatrapati, shift from CAPEX to OPEX, faster time-to-market and driving innovation have been the key benefits brought about by transitioning to the cloud.

One of the most critical litmus tests for any IT projects is the ROI. Managing 50% cost savings on infrastructure management was no mean achievement. Talking about savings, the biggest savings for the company came from turning CAPEX to variable OPEX. HDM being a content provider and aggregator has a large storage requirement and the Cloud provided a low cost alternative for storage. “The basic ‘pay for what you use’ allows us to turn CAPEX to OPEX. This frees the company from the wasted capacity due to over-provisioning or worries of under-provisioning if it reaches the peak point,” explains Chhatrapati. Centralised storage and flexibility afforded by the cloud provided the requisite manageability and scalability.

With the capital no longer tied down, what it means for HDM is being able to concentrate on growing its core business and setting up operations in a timely manner for global expansion. No more constrained by infrastructure, the developers can spin up the infrastructure within minutes instead of waiting for weeks to experiment and test new ideas quickly and roll out successful ideas to the market. With the time and resources at hand, the HDM team is able to drive innovation and differentiated customer offerings, and a lot of sleepless nights for its competitors.