Content area
Full text
Originally an online CD store, CD Baby now primarily deals in “music as a service,” serving 700,000 independent music artists by managing the distribution of over 10 million unique tracks through download platforms and streaming services such as Spotify. In parallel, its IT team manages the consequences of software’s move to an as-a-service model.
It’s not just the way CD Baby ships product that has changed since VP of IT Tom Beohm (pronounced “beam”) joined the company in 2010 as a lead systems engineer. “My role has evolved dramatically in those 12 years,” he says. “I’ve seen two complete revolutions of our technology stack and infrastructure.”
The first of those revolutions was the move to virtual servers and centralized storage. Now he’s moving to a hybrid cloud model and further consolidating storage infrastructure.
Beohm’s team of nine IT staff provides operations, engineering and database administration support for around 200 employees at CD Baby. And support for SaaS applications — including an ongoing move to a cloud-based ERP platform — comes within that too.
SaaS spending is growing
CD Baby isn’t the only company consuming more software as a service: While Gartner is less optimistic about SaaS spending growth than it was at the start of the year, it still expects global SaaS spend to increase 16.8% to reach $195 billion in 2023.
Behind that increase, though, lie some challenges because IT departments don’t always manage, or even know about, all of the increased SaaS usage.
“I view software-as-a-service as the current extension of shadow IT,” says Beohm. That really made itself felt on the help desk: “We started to see requests coming from our user community, saying ‘Hey, I need help with product X,’ and my help desk team has no idea, which raises all kind of red flags.”
Some...