About ICE

ICE is the result of a big vision for the music industry. They sit at the exciting junction between technology, data and digital music consumption, addressing many of the industry’s biggest challenges. ICE is purpose-driven in its mission to enable accurate, transparent and fair compensation for songwriters and publishers on an international basis. They achieve this through their music licensing, processing and copyright services. ICE’s team negotiates deals with digital music services and many other services that rely on and benefit from music in their services.

Based in the UK, Germany and Sweden, with a multi-national team working together each day to benefit rightsholders, this work has seen ICE distribute more than €3bn in digital royalties to its customers since 2015.

The Challenge

ICE was looking to transform its technology platform by adopting cloud and distributed computing, leveraging the best, currently available cloud platform (AWS), the most popular language stack/runtime (JVM, with Java and Scala) and a range of modern, scalable and resilient technologies (GRPC/HTTP, AWS DynamoDB/OpenSearch/, AWS S3, AWS Kinesis/SNS/SQS, /ECS/, serverless).

The organisation was also looking to embrace agile methodologies, with quick delivery cycles and close collaboration between different functions, using a multi-functional delivery teams that are self-organising, largely autonomous and responsible for the entire delivery cycle: from design to operations.

Solution

ICE was keen to get external expertise to help develop the platform with speed whilst ensuring the performance of the final product. OB Collective was selected as a technology partner due to its ability to really understand ICE’s requirements for the combination of top talent, speed and cultural fit. OB Collective was able to quickly identify what was needed and using its best-in-class associate bench, allowed us to provide ICE with short-term capacity boosts and subject-matter-experts for the project.

With OB Collective as a technology resourcing partner, ICE was able to augment its development team in a short span of time with highly motivated individuals to help deliver a complex platform for our customers. Govinda Fichtner — CTO