The Cleveland Orchestra Data Migration Solution

The Cleveland Orchestra employs roughly 105 musicians and 120 staff members, including: administration, marketing, development/fundraising, artistic, finance, and facilities. The Information Technology department of the Cleveland Orchestra supports activities at both Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra, and Blossom Music Center. Box office activities are conducted at both locations, however only seasonally at Blossom.

What Problem Did The Cleveland Orchestra Face?

In addition to box office, fundraising activities are conducted and maintained by the IT department. Box office and fundraising activities are the two revenue generating arms of the Cleveland Orchestra. Each of these applications were being maintained by two separate systems each with their own independent database. There was no sharing of information between the two systems and a large number of ancillary spreadsheets and access databases were being kept track of outside of those two systems. The Orchestra had no single place to look for their customer information; thus causing the Cleveland Orchestra to look for a new way to better serve their patrons.

Why Did The Cleveland Orchestra Choose Solutient?

Director of Information Systems, David Vivino states, "...we had no SQL 2000 experience so, at the time, we went to Solutient Corporation of Ohio because we knew they were Microsoft certified trainers. We had some past training from Solutient before, so we came to a couple of courses at Solutient and soon after that we signed a contract with Tessitura, placed an order for our servers, and so forth." The Orchestra knew they needed to perform some infrastructure changes to enable the Tessitura system to run properly. Because of the success the Cleveland Orchestra had with their training, they turned back to Solutient for assistance.

Resulting Benefits

The Cleveland Orchestra and the roughly 120 computer users are very happy with the Tessitura database migration. The system is much better than the old and allows for more time to be spent helping the patrons of the Orchestra. David Vivino expressed his overall enjoyment of the conversion: "I can honestly say that I'm glad we came to the Microsoft courses that were offered by Solutient because that's how we found the excellent consultants that we've been using for the past couple of years on this project and others."

Detailed Case study
See the interview with David Vivino