Sony Rewards

99%

uptime

$150k+

annual capital investment savings

$200k+

annual infrastructure savings

"The cloud computing environment that Metal Toad built provided significant savings on our traditional in house hosted environment while delivering a more reliable site, and providing a better customer experience."

— Gerard Lomonaco, VP Operations/Technology, Sony

Business problem: Expensive, unreliable legacy tech

Sony Rewards is the destination for fans to earn prizes for enjoying Sony content. But the site had a popularity problem: during hot promotions, the traffic surge would overwhelm their servers and crash the entire site. And general site unreliability was undermining conversions.

The issue was outdated tech: Sony Rewards was hosted on old physical IBM servers. There was no way to scale up capacity when needed, and the clunky legacy infrastructure led to unreliability.

Technology solution: Elasticity and reliability in the cloud

Metal Toad’s first order of business was to get the site’s capacity up to snuff with an elastic cloud solution using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Now their server capacity can stretch to meet traffic demands.

A number of other innovations have improved the site’s reliability. With Amazon Cloud Formation, we can repair in a few hours issues that used to take days to resolve. The Amazon Virtual Private Cloud gives the team full control and avoids unexpected downtime. Microsoft Always On Clustering reduced the number of servers needed.

Impact: More revenue, less cost

In past years, site outages during Black Friday weekend caused Sony Rewards to lose customers. Last year, we doubled their server capacity—and kept the site humming (and generating revenue) all weekend.

These improvements save money, too. Eliminating the capital investment in physical servers frees up over $150,000 a year, and reducing server space saves around $200,000 a year on infrastructure operations.

Media & Entertainment Case Studies

We've helped hundreds of companies over the two decades we have been in the software business; from new software product development to managed services, see how we've helped some of the biggest brands out there succeed.
Case Study

Wheel of Fortune

Now the Wheel of Fortune site can keep pace with fans’ excitement. When the team launches a new sweepstakes, preventative scaling… Read More

Case Study

ABC Television

The new system revamped the entire sales process, making it faster, easier, and more efficient. Read More

Case Study

Machine Learning Security

Since our initial engagement in 2012 for a multi-site Drupal installation, DC Entertainment and its management team at Warner… Read More

Case Study

Fox Metadata

Metal Toad was a natural partner in realizing the vision of the One Fox initiative. We helmed a large-scale strategic discovery… Read More

Case Study

The Philadelphia Orchestra

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s excellence has earned the lofty expectations from its sponsors, donors, and patrons. Read More

Case Study

Sony.com Search

Ultimately, Metal Toad recommended the Custom Enterprise Search stack. This solution offered Sony full transparency into every… Read More

Case Study

Sony.com

Metal Toad provided a robust, flexible, and customized CMS. Read More

Case Study

Sony Rewards

Eliminating the capital investment in physical servers frees up over $150,000 a year, and reducing server space saves around $200… Read More

Case Study

Sony Crackle

Metal Toad designed and built a new platform rooted in the idea of infrastructure as code (IAC)—an approach that automates and… Read More

Case Study

Sony

For over a decade, Sony and Metal Toad have collaboratively constructed a robust internal cloud infrastructure. Read More

Schedule a Free Consultation

Speak with our team to understand how Metal Toad can help you drive innovation, growth, and success.