With legacy systems on CICS and the interface limited to 3270 screens, SUISA needed a better way to represent 1.7 million copyright holders across 100 constituent groups to some 90,000 customers in the music business.

According to Nick Theofanidis, the manager of databases and system administration group, SUISA built its GUI-driven, transaction-oriented services on the mainframe with Cincom Smalltalk because it integrated applications with the desktop, independent of platform, and with interfaces to customers worldwide.

SUISA thus deployed a web-enabled global repository of everyone holding music copyrights in all constituent groups. Hundreds of users may now be online simultaneously, and SUISA uses real-time data on a global distribution network to collect royalties and pay copyright owners.