Oracle Customer Success—Sony Corporation

Sony Boosts Competitiveness, Improves Customer Confidence, and Enhances Support

We embedded MySQL Standard Edition in our optical-disc archive system because it provides the performance and features we required, and it enhanced our product’s competitiveness. Oracle’s reliable and reputable open-source database also strengthened customer confidence in the quality of Sony products and improved our support capabilities.

— Muneyoshi Benzaki, Senior Software Engineer, Section One, Solution System Design Department, System Solutions Business Division, Professional Solutions Group, Sony Corporation

Established in 1946, Sony Corporation produced Japan’s first magnetic tape recorder and transistor radio. The company is now a global leader in the development and manufacturer of a broad range of electronic products. Sony has also expanded into the entertainment sector through its cinema and electronic-game offerings. In addition, the company has developed a successful line of broadcasting equipment products—including an optical-disc archive system for professionals in the digital content-creation industry. The archive system adopts a new concept of managing data as files, while holding 12 optical discs in a cartridge for use as a single large-capacity storage unit.

Business Challenge

Enable broadcasting stations to rapidly search, view, and store up to 800 TB of video data via the new optical-disc archive system to boost Sony’s competitive advantage
Improve response time for customer inquiries, such as when handling errors in searching media content, to raise customer confidence and satisfaction
Gain flexibility to expand use of the archive-management solution to other business areas, such as data backup, to increase market potential

Results

Reduced broadcasting stations’ maintenance costs and power consumption by embedding MySQL Standard Edition as the media-content-management software for the archive system—enabling users to easily and quickly view video data on their desktops without accessing massive data files
Strengthened product competitiveness by using Oracle’s reliable and reputable open-source database, and increased customer confidence in purchasing Sony products

Enhanced product-support capabilities by gaining direct access to Oracle’s MySQL support team and sharing knowledge with MySQL’s active, global user community, enabling Sony staff to provide faster responses and resolutions to customer inquiries
Supported business growth by using a unified, MySQL-based product-research and development platform and enabled the company to expand into additional business areas, such as corporate data disaster recovery and medical imaging systems

Why They Chose Oracle

After evaluating the features, performance, and costs of various relational-database-management systems (RDBMS), Sony chose MySQL Standard Edition because it offered the required capabilities, performance, and the flexibility of an open-source database platform. It also enabled faster and better product support service.

We considered a number of possibilities, including PostgreSQL, but decided to use MySQL for our archive system. MySQL Standard Edition was the perfect fit, as it provided our customers with the capability to access, extract, and manage massive volumes of metadata materials in the system, and it improves product competitiveness.

— Takeshi Kanda, Deputy General Manager, Workflow Solution Technology Development Department, Professional Solutions Group, Imaging Products and Solutions Sector, Sony Corporation

Execution

Sony spent a few months determining which RDBMS to install in the archive system before implementing MySQL Standard Edition. It took approximately six months to complete the design and development. The company then began mass production of the new MySQL-embedded, optical-disc archive system.

About Sony Corporation

Headquarters

Tokyo, Japan

Employees

140,900

Annual Revenue

Over $5 Billion

Sony Corporation

Oracle Solutions Used

MySQL Standard Edition

Published: Jan 30, 2015