Case studies

RCS MediaGroup is one of the world’s major multimedia publishing groups, mainly present in Italy and Spain, with a 32% turnover generated by foreign markets. As all modern publishing Company, RCS is active in all publishing sectors: newspapers, magazines, TV channels, web, advertising. RCS main brands are for example for the Italian market “Corriere della Sera” (the most sold Italian newspaper), “La Gazzetta dello Sport”, “Sette”, “Io Donna”, Abitare”, “Oggi”, etc. and for the Spanish market “El Mundo”, “Marca”, “Expansiòn”, etc.

Mr. Marco Mazzola, who works for RCS MediaGroup and manages the adoption of CMDBuild, during the CMDBuild DAY 2016 speaks about their project.

The main reason for the adoption of a CMDB solution is that RCS has a huge amount of information to manage. RCS MediaGroup has several newspapers and magazines, and most of these have web sites, there are more than 1000 websites, about 300 blogs, 100 web applications, 100 physical servers, 200 on premises VMs and 500 cloud VMs, several technologies to manage, etc. Having so many configurable components and dependencies between components, this can become a problem when you have to maintain a server service or if you have to move a service from a system hosting it to a new system. Every day in RCS we have deployment of new releases, continuous delivery and the services are critical, managing newspapers that have to be up and running 24/7. What is really important is to have a reliable and always updated map of all services, a system able to track all the system changes, especially the ones done manually, and that can help to do maintenance activities is a safe way.

So, we decided to adopt an asset management system and feed it with most important items and relations, also via automatic discovery. It was important that the system was reliable, with most information discovered automatically (and not even manually alterable) and with other items and relations to be manually populated, and also customizable, open and available to integrate customizations to be developed also later on. The system was requested to have an approval process for changes done, to have a short learning curve, a low adoption budget and running costs.

All these reasons brought us to choose CMDBuild for our project. We decided to adopt the CMDBuild READY2USE solution, to benefit from its great out-of-the-box hierarchy of items, which covers most of the typical IT assets model, that we then extended but it was a perfect starting point. The project steps have been: installation, extension of the standard data model and hierarchy, development of web components for configuration file exposition, development of connectors, done by Tecnoteca, as well as of the approval process configuration and of reports. The development and implementation time has been set in two months, and the goal has been reached. Additional benefits of having adopted CMDBuild are the fact that the connectors developed by Tecnoteca have logs that detects also inconsistences and unused existing items, so we could as well clean up our configuration, and the fact that the learning curve is so short that even not trained personnel could use since the beginning the tool autonomously, drill down entities, make searches and export information.