Garth Brooks, Pink Floyd and Wynton Marsalis have about as much in common as a kazoo and a synthesizer. But these performers are all jammin' online, thanks to a new Web infrastructure and service-oriented application architecture EMI Music North America developed for its music labels - well-known brands such as Capital Records and Virgin Records - and the hundreds of artists recording under those music labels.

Application flexibility gained from the service-oriented architecture is providing the music labels, essentially EMI business units, unprecedented flexibility. This while IT turned its Web infrastructure from an unmanaged liability into a potential revenue-generator. For these accomplishments, achieved with a budget of less than $1 million, we honor EMI Music North America as a 2004 User Excellence Award runner-up.

"This is the first time as an IT organization that we are no longer a bottleneck . . . but can work proactively with the business to help set strategy," says Seth Brady, director of application services at EMI Music North America in New York. "IT is now a service group looking to be leveraged by multiple music labels."

Previously, IT had nothing to do with Web efforts for the music labels. Each music label had a New Media Department, mostly marketing specialists, handling Web site development. And, each music label "did its own thing" when it came to selecting servers, databases and application development platforms for their Web operations, says Brady, who previously supported an intranet and extranet for EMI's central sales and marketing group. Some music labels favored Windows, Internet Information Server (IIS) and ASP.Net; others swore by Linux, Apache server and Java Server Pages (JSP).

The sites were snazzy, but behind their cool façades was an IT mess. "The labels quickly became tied to a very limited form of Web marketing because the technology couldn't support new initiatives," Brady says.

Each music label essentially had a homegrown Web content management system for every artist site. Each time an artist released an album, "all the meta data associated with that album and all the digital assets would need to go into these homegrown systems," he says. "We quickly realized the strong need for a central application that could be used to syndicate this kind of content out to the types of Web sites we were managing."