Govinda Fichtner named Chief Technology Officer at pan-European licensing hub ICE – Music Business Worldwide

Govinda Fichtner has been named Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at ICE, a pan-European hub for music licensing created by three collection societies: PRS for Music (UK), STIM (Sweden) and GEMA (Germany).

Fichtner joins the company from IONOS, a web hosting and Cloud provider in Europe.

ICE says that it has distributed more than €2.3 billionn to rightsholders to date, it says.

In his most recent role at IONOS as VP Cloud Technology, Fichtner was responsible for growing and building the company’s Cloud alternative by developing and operating a product portfolio with large-scale development projects in a tech organisation distributed over multiple countries.

Fichtner brings more than 23 years of experience in the IT industry to the role at ICE, having began his career as a software engineer in the media industry.

He has also worked in different engineering-related roles for companies ranging from start-ups to corporations like T-Systems and IBM.

At IBM, says ICE, Fichtner built the AWS business for IBM Business Services in Germany, Switzerland and Austria as CTO AWS.

He was also responsible for supporting customers with his expertise as Chief Architect, building large-scale, distributed applications in the IoT space.

Govinda takes up his role in April 2022.

“From the start I was attracted to this unique opportunity to help evolve ICE for the future.”

Govinda Fichtner

Govinda Fichtner, 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.

“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.”

“I’m delighted to bring Govinda on-board as part of my leadership team.”

Peter de Mönnink, ICE

Peter de Mönnink, ICE CEO, added: “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.”Music Business Worldwide