Copyright Clearance Center (CCC, www.copyright.com) works primarily with business, academic, and medical institutions, enabling them to access the vital content that supports their work. CCC manages fee payments to the license holders and content creators who own the content. DevOps approaches have transformed CCC, a global leader in content rights-licensing solutions, resulting in expanded service to an increasing market.

“In production, CCC is already processing millions of dollars in transactions. This came to life within a year of the inception date for the DevOps project. For a startup that would be fast. For a medium-sized enterprise, I think that is outstanding,” says Babis Marmanis, CTO & VP of Engineering, Copyright Clearance Center.

The DevOps transformation that took place in the internal structure of CCC’s engineering department continues today, allowing the organization to respond to the massive disruption in the publishing industry, which is due in part to digital content and the Internet. Using DevOps, Marmanis and CCC have accelerated product development, sped time to market, and provided a stronger consumer experience with the product.

Accelerated Product Development

“The Copyright Clearance Center vision is to create the most comprehensive portfolio of global licensing and content solutions (products) that make copyright work for everyone. My product platform strategy stems from that,” says Marmanis.

CCC has multiple software-based products, each performing the same or similar functions and acting on the same or similar data. “There are certain fundamental things that we must abstract appropriately and encapsulate into common components to make development work optimally,” says Marmanis.

But when Marmanis came to CCC, there were no common components. And what is more the internal systems lacked interoperability, skills were different across internal teams, and there was no cohesiveness to the development approach. These factors slowed software product development.

A DevOps mindset was crucial to changing the status quo, to treating infrastructure as code, and to bringing in automation, says Marmanis. A DevOps approach would help to speed the delivery of software projects into the marketplace.

“Now we use Jenkins (www.cloudbees.com) to glue together elements of the continuous integration process. We have Jenkins build jobs that retrieve the source code from GitHub (https://github.com). We publish software artifacts to Artifactory (www.jfrog.com),” says Marmanis.

For each release, Marmanis’s teams use Jenkins to execute Chef (www.chef.io) recipes. They deploy artifacts from Artifactory onto a pre-specified execution environment. “In addition, and this is key to the overall scheme, we execute the schema updates with Liquibase (www.liquibase.org), and everything is coordinated with Jenkins,” says Marmanis.

Further, CCC built its cornerstone platform from the ground up using DevOps-related tools, build detection software, and software libraries. The infrastructure that CCC added is based on best-of-breed open source libraries.

“Using programming languages such as Java (www.java.com) and Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org), Gradle (www.gradle.org) scripts, postgreSQL as the relational database, Liquibase for database objects, Tomcat (http://tomcat.apache.org) as a servlet container, Apache Camel (http://camel.apache.org) for messaging and enterprise integration, and countless other tools including Apache Directory Studio (http://directory.apache.org/studio) and Bootstrap (http://getbootstrap.com/)—the list is very long—we were able to create a harmonious ecosystem,” says Marmanis.

Stronger Consumer Product Experience

CCC offers its consumers a better product experience through DevOps approaches and through a homogeneity of standards and technologies, which is available when using open source tools.

“When we’re building the product platform, these initiatives allow us to embody timeless design principles such as crisp abstractions, but also allow us to scale in a number of dimensions including the number of works that we can represent, the number of publishers we can admit and manage, the number of customers that we have, the number of applications that we can build and deploy, and the number of market verticals that we can occupy,” says Marmanis. This is crucial to customer satisfaction.

One product that is a prime example of how CCC keeps customers happy is RightsLink for Open Access. “Using RightsLink for Open Access, we facilitate fee collection for articles published under an Open Access license, mediating between the publisher and the author to collect those fees,” says Marmanis. Then CCC aggregates those transactions and presents them to the publisher.

“Obviously, we give the money to the publisher, but we also create reporting for the authors, publishers, and institutions as well as the founding agencies that gave the money to the author or the institution respectively for funding that research,” says Marmanis. The RightsLink for Open Access product keeps transactions simple, integrating with publisher workflows to expedite publication.