Tuesday, 29 March 2022 – ICE, the world’s first integrated music copyright, licensing and processing hub, is excited to announce that Govinda Fichtner will be joining as Chief Technology Officer to lead on the company’s transformation and data management. He joins ICE from IONOS, a leading web hosting and Cloud provider in Europe.
Govinda will spearhead the company’s innovative approach to copyright and online processing, ensuring ICE stays ahead of the modern data challenge. In his role, he will lead the development of new solutions to support the company’s CMO, as well as publisher customers in delivering value for their songwriters.
Having already distributed more than €2.3bn to rightsholders, ICE is uniquely positioned to take these next steps from its current platform of large-scale, real-world success.
Commenting on his new position, Govinda Fichtner, CTO at ICE said: “From the start I was attracted to this unique opportunity to help evolve ICE for the future. A key part of this exciting mission is the strategic capability to work efficiently with huge amounts of data – be it copyright or DSP usage. Clearly, the best IT foundation to support a scalable 24/7 system has a cloud-based infrastructure and with over 15 years’ experience in building cloud-based solutions, I am really looking forward to applying this experience to create a very strong technology foundation for the future of ICE.”
Welcoming the news, Peter de Mönnink, ICE CEO said: “Finding the right CTO for an organisation like ICE, is a strategic appointment since we match un-rivalled expertise in musical copyright to technology. In a dynamic and fast-moving industry, we need to continue to deliver today whilst imagining and realising what tomorrow could look like.
“I’m delighted to bring Govinda on-board as part of my leadership team. It’s by having a passionate team, who bring the skills and expertise to an already purpose-driven organisation, we can achieve unique things together.”
Govinda brings more than 23 years of experience in the IT industry to the role at ICE, having started his career as a software engineer in the media industry and having worked in different engineering-related roles for companies ranging from start-ups to large corporations like T-Systems, IBM and lately IONOS.
As an early adopter of Open Source, Agile Development and DevOps practices, Govinda understood the potential of cloud computing early on in 2006 and specialised in building sophisticated applications on top of cloud providers like AWS.
With this background, he has built the AWS business for IBM Business Services in Germany, Switzerland and Austria as CTO AWS. There he was also responsible for supporting lighthouse customers with his expertise as Chief Architect building large-scale, distributed applications for example in the IoT space.
Govinda officially takes up his role in April 2022.
About ICE
ICE offers a flexible suite of services for Publishers, Collective Management Organisations (CMOs) and Rightsholders, which includes copyright administration, multi-territorial online licensing processing and Digital Service Provider (DSP) licensing solutions.
The market-leading, authoritative and accurate, ICE copyright service underpins distributions for a wide range of CMOs. The ICE copyright database holds over 45 million musical works.
The ICE Core represents over 330,000 rightsholders. It covers repertoire from societies such as BMI, GEMA, IMRO, PRS, Sabam, STIM and the independent publishers Concord, Downtown/Songtrust, and Peermusic.*
ICE’s multi-territorial online processing service also supports the repertoires of SonyATV (via Solar) Warner Chappell & BMG (via ARESA).
ICE has processed trillions of online music uses from music streaming services and paid over €2.3 billion back to rightsholders since March 2016.
ICE is based in the UK, Germany and Sweden.
