IBM today announced its hybrid cloud deal with Russia’s Mariinsky Theatre.
The enterprise IT company did not disclose the financial details of the hybrid cloud deal.
Russia’s Mariinsky Theatre earlier tried Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, but failed to improve customer experience.
Mariinsky Theatre Russia will benefit from the deployment of IBM hybrid cloud solution as it can provide access to live streaming video performances on the web, tablets or other mobile devices to theater enthusiasts across 150 countries.
More than 250,000 unique viewers around the world have visited Mariinsky.tv, which features an archive of on-demand videos.
“To support a growing global community of loyal Theatre audiences, we needed a scalable, hybrid cloud solution that could meet the standards for quality that we and our viewers expect,” said Eugene Barbashin, head of the computer technology department, Mariinsky Theatre.
“We tried various competitive offerings from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, but viewers still had buffering issues while streaming performances. We chose IBM Cloud to more fully meet our needs in terms of reliable performance and ease-of-use,” Barbashin said.
Before working with IBM, the Theatre had been broadcasting performances online using its own on-premises technology. Operas and ballets were filmed, edited and streamed from the Theatre’s server to hundreds of viewers. The company was not happy with the customer experience.
To help grow its online audience, the Mariinsky Theatre sought a new and more reliable solution to deliver consistent viewing experiences while gaining the flexibility to accommodate peaks in demand – which could mean scaling to support thousands of simultaneous viewers across the globe.
IBM Cloud will support the Mariinsky Theatre to accommodate expanded workloads. Based on the SoftLayer infrastructure from IBM, the Theatre has more flexibility to stream video replays and has been able to limit performance lags like excessive buffering by 30 percent.
IBM said its total cloud revenue from hybrid, public and private engagements was $7.7 billion in the previous 12 months at the end of March 2015; it grew more than 60 percent in first quarter of 2015.
Baburajan K
editor@infotechlead.com
