Sentric Music streamlines FinOps with DoiT Cloud Intelligence™ and Ava
Meet Sentric Music
Sentric is on a mission to make it easy for professional songwriters and artists to get the royalties they’re entitled to. Unlike traditional music publishers, Sentric’s platform is built on the idea that publishing should be a service offered to all songwriters, putting the writer in stronger control over the rights to their music.
Sentric was founded in 2006 in Liverpool to help songwriters publish their music at a fair rate. It has since grown beyond the UK, with offices in Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, and the United States. It now represents over 400,000 songwriters as a publisher
Sentric’s music publishing platform includes a transparent 28-day rolling contract, which is unique among major music publishers. It gives writers a 80/20 royalty split (favoring the writer), allowing them to retain ownership of their copyrights while using Sentric’s comprehensive suite of publishing tools.
The Challenge
Sentric, is focused on expanding its operations globally while keeping cloud costs predictable and under control. Sentric has deployed its platform using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a large part of history which has meant managing complex cloud infrastructure has always been a significant challenge.
Before working with DoiT, Sentric’s cloud costs were increasing rapidly, and tracking where the money was going was time-consuming and frustrating. Sentric’s goal was to introduce clarity and control over its cloud infrastructure so that its internal team could spend more time focusing on service improvements without disruption from sudden rises in cloud expenses.
“Our business has grown organically over the past 17 years or so now,” says Stephen Roughley, Head of Engineering at Sentric Music. “Somewhere into that journey, we decided to use AWS to develop our infrastructure. We have not looked back from that, but as the business has grown, as our needs have grown, so too has our use of the platform.”
Sentric first interacted with DoiT as part of a service agreement with a previous parent company, explains Stephen. “We were really impressed with what we saw. The savings alone and the fact that all we needed to do was sign up were an exciting business model.”
The Solution
The engagement with DoiT quickly showed value, with immediate reductions in cloud bills, which led Sentric to dive deeper into cloud optimization within DoiT Cloud Intelligence. One of the services Sentric has made particular use of is Ava, DoiT’s Agentic FinOps Analyst. Ava is an AI feature built directly into the DoiT console that engineers and FinOps teams use to quickly diagnose cloud issues, uncover cost anomalies, and act on optimization opportunities using natural language queries.
As Stephen talks about his first time using Ava: “I fired up the DoiT console and I saw that Ava was being promoted. I thought I’d give it a go. Within maybe five to ten minutes, Ava guided me right down into the low-level detail of the services that we were running in our compute environment, named the exact instances that were starting to chew through our money, produced a report for me that showed that this was almost a direct correlation to the cost growth that we were seeing, which meant that we were able to get on top of it pretty much immediately.”
What sets Ava apart is its ability to learn from each customer’s unique cloud environment while drawing from DoiT’s cloud reliability engineering expertise. This means every insight is rooted in real-world cloud intelligence, based on thousands of optimization scenarios across hundreds of multicloud environments.
“The time saved was incredible. When we first spotted this issue, my initial reaction, having not already come to rely on Ava, was to jump into AWS Cost Explorer. And that just turned up more questions. And in fact, I recall now my first attempt to engage with Ava was to try to understand why the AWS Cost Explorer wasn’t really making any sense to me. Ava made things simpler and easier to understand quickly.”
The DoiT team focused on helping Sentric with cloud cost management, allocations, and cloud governance. With DoiT Allocations, Sentric could easily assign cloud spend to specific projects, teams, or business units. Using guidance from Ava, Sentric also streamlined AWS account management and implemented AWS Control Tower to improve security. Finally, DoiT helped Sentric create cost management automation processes to maintain continuous optimization.
“Having that sort of guidance from Ava and DoiT to explain what was going on and what we were doing to fix it actually helped me to maintain trust with our accounts department and our finance director,” says Stephen.
The Results
The success of Sentric’s work with DoiT is illustrated by significant cost savings of approximately £30,000 annually and time savings of around 10 hours per week. The engineering team has significantly increased its operational efficiency, freeing up time to focus on platform development and innovation. Streamlined processes and improved cost visibility have also strengthened cross-team collaboration, making it easier for stakeholders to stay aligned on business goals.
What's Next?
Sentric, has ambitious goals to expand the digital-first music publishing they have started globally. Sentric, have set themselves up to become the world’s first and best choice for new, emerging and self-releasing musicians and songwriters to publish and distribute their art globally.
