Case Studies
Learn how others are using the Windows Azure platform to cut costs and increase their agility.
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3M Launches Web-based Visual Attention Service to Heighten Design Impact
A recognized world leader in technology research and development, 3M wanted to make its decades of expertise in the workings of the human visual system available as a service to customers. Using the Windows Azure™ platform, 3M created a Web-based application that gives designers the ability to invoke complex algorithms to analyze the effectiveness of a design, based on how the human eye will respond. By hosting its application in Microsoft® data centers, 3M has made an innovative service available to a global audience, while minimizing its investment in hardware infrastructure and ongoing administration. The solution, which permitted developers to evaluate frequent iterations of the application, helped the company speed time-to-market for its service and achieve higher quality results, faster than in a traditional development environment. 
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Software Company Efficiently and Cost-Effectively Delivers Software-plus-Services
Acumatica is a software company that develops enterprise resource planning and business accounting software. Acumatica developed its Web-based software using the Microsoft® .NET Framework and offered on-premises software that required customers to invest in application and database servers. The company wanted to deliver a software-plus-services solution to its customers, effectively hosting and managing its solutions on the Internet through data centers. Acumatica chose to develop its software-plus-services application using Windows Azure™, Microsoft SQL Azure and Microsoft .NET Services. As a result, Acumatica developed its hosted offering in five weeks, reduced capital expenditures, reduced the deployment time for customers while improving their ability to quickly scale up and down, and improved its time-to-market for new services. -
Energy Monitoring Firm Saves Money, Scales Business with Hosted Computing Platform
Advanced Telemetry helps businesses monitor and control energy usage both on-premises and remotely with its EcoView system and EcoView Web application. The company has experienced tremendous growth, encouraging it to reexamine the scalability of its computing architecture. To reduce costs, increase scalability, and improve service, Advanced Telemetry is using the Windows Azure™ platform for hosted application and data storage plus the Visual WebGui application platform from Microsoft® BizSpark partner Gizmox to provide rapid development and run-time efficiencies for cloud applications. Advanced Telemetry developers have been able to use existing programming skills and experience with Microsoft development tools to migrate to Windows Azure. This saves the company money, improves functionality, and enables it to easily scale its computing resources to keep up with its rapid growth. -
Interactive Solution Provider Gains Agility, Conserves Costs with Hosted Services
Archetype, an interactive technology solution provider, developed the Archetype Media Platform (AMP), which includes the AMP Editor, AMP Portal, AMP Manager and AMP Analytics applications. The firm faced common challenges with scalability, time-consuming deployments, and high entry costs for its customers. Archetype migrated its existing AMP solution to the Windows Azure™ platform and developed additional components specifically to take advantage of the new system. The firm found it easy to develop for Windows Azure—which facilitates expeditious, direct deployment to the cloud through the Windows Azure portal—and it anticipates greater business and development agility as a result, promoting cost savings and more-timely response to customer needs. The firm’s customers note the increased performance and shorter time-to-value with Windows Azure as compared with traditional solutions. -
Worldwide News Provider Creates New Content Channels with Hosted Computing
The Associated Press (AP) is the world’s largest news organization, with bureaus in 97 countries. On average, more than half the world’s population sees news from AP on a given day. AP wanted to broaden its reach by encouraging developers to incorporate AP content into their applications. Using the Microsoft-hosted Windows Azure™ platform, AP created a highly scalable solution that simplifies capacity planning and creates new business opportunities. -
Developer Scales Search-and-Rescue Application to Help Save More Lives at Sea
Responding to high numbers of deaths at sea in the fishing industry, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution contracted Active Web Solutions (AWS) to create an automated sea-safety application. AWS developed a location-based service infrastructure, code-named GeoPoint, which transmits position data to a centralized tracking and alerting system. AWS used GeoPoint to build MOB Guardian, a search-and-rescue application for fishing vessels. To extend GeoPoint to more scenarios, AWS migrated it to the Windows Azure™ platform. By hosting GeoPoint in the “cloud,” in Microsoft® data centers, AWS attained massive scalability, richer functionality, and lower infrastructure costs. AWS was able to quickly convert its application to a hosted service and avoid the expense of building and managing a data center. AWS also has the flexibility and scalability to offer GeoPoint to many more markets. -
Leading Integration Company Speeds to Market with Cloud-to-Cloud Interoperation
Cast Iron Systems specializes in helping organizations connect Internet-hosted (cloud) applications with on-premises applications. When Microsoft announced the Windows Azure™ platform, Cast Iron set out to enhance its Cast Iron Integration Solution with Windows Azure platform connectivity. Using the Service Bus and Access Control Service, Cast Iron created the needed connectors in just one day. Faster time-to-market enabled Cast Iron to supply a timely solution to an urgent need. Its enhanced product can help customers host applications off-premises without concerns about interoperability with on-premises data. With the Cast Iron Integration Solution, companies can now use application data wherever it resides and scale workloads without worrying about overloading the communications infrastructure. -
Financial Services ISV Fosters Flexibility and Cost Savings with Hosted Solution
CCH, which provides software for business professionals, adapted its sales tax–calculation application to run on the Windows Azure™ platform. CCH expects its use of Windows Azure to result in greater choice for customers, the ability to scale on demand, and lower costs. The company found the learning curve for the migration experience to be smooth and easy for developers because of the familiar tool set and operating environment of the Windows Azure platform. -
City Government Improves Service Offerings, Cuts Costs with “Cloud” Services Solution
The City of Miami, even when limited by a tight budget, looks for ways to improve the services it offers citizens. The city wanted to develop an online application to record, track, and report on nonemergency incidents, but the application’s sophisticated mapping technology would require significant computing resources. Further constrained by long hardware-procurement cycles, the city needed a cost-effective, scalable solution that would maximize its available resources. The city developed its 311 application on the Windows Azure platform, taking advantage of scalable storage, processing power, and hosting provided by Microsoft. As a result, the city was able to reduce IT costs, improve the services it offers citizens, and deliver those services faster than before. It also now relies on a cost-effective disaster-recovery model, an important benefit in this hurricane-prone region. -
Environment Agency’s Pioneering Online Tools Bring Revolutionary Data to Citizens
An agency of the European Union, the European Environment Agency (EEA) provides independent and reliable information on the environment for policy makers and the general public. The agency is working towards raising environmental awareness across Europe by delivering easy-to-understand information about a number of environmental topics—among them, water and air quality. It also encourages citizens to contribute their own observations about the environment around them. Working with Microsoft, it developed the Eye On Earth platform, based on the Windows Azure “cloud” services operating system. Users can view water or air quality from the 32 member countries of the EEA, using high-definition Bing maps. The EEA has also launched the Environmental Atlas of Europe, which features stories told by eyewitnesses about their first-hand experiences of climate change. Both solutions can help broaden awareness of the impacts of environmental change and help people in Europe make better-informed choices about their environment. -
Location-Sharing Solution Provider Gains Productivity, Agility with Hosted Services
Glympse provides a Web-based location-sharing solution for use with GPS-enabled phones. The company constantly evaluates available hosting services to ensure that it is taking advantage of all that technology has to offer. Glympse turned to the Windows Azure™ platform because it offered integrated development tools and less of a management burden than the hosting service from Amazon that Glympse was using. Glympse has found that the performance and developer effectiveness possible with the Windows Azure platform surpasses those offered by the Amazon service. Glympse also gains credibility by offering a Microsoft-hosted solution, particularly with regard to stability and scalability. Perhaps most importantly, working with Windows Azure means that Glympse can be more responsive to customer needs because it can focus on improving its solution features rather than on infrastructure maintenance. -
Hosting Provider Extends Service Offerings, Attracts Customers with “Cloud” Platform
GoGrid partnered with Blue Star Infotech to develop a suite of tools that help customers seamlessly build and deploy applications for Windows Azure. The solution, the Windows Azure Lifecycle Management service, interoperates with the existing GoGrid infrastructure and includes preconfigured development environments, enabling developers to build applications and publish them to Windows Azure. -
Developer Boosts Agility, Reduces Costs with Web-based Supply Chain Management Tools
GXS was eager to find a cost-effective way to add more detailed, on-demand analytics services to its industry-leading business-to-business e-commerce platform, GXS Trading Grid®. The company turned to Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner MindTree to help develop a solution based on Windows Azure™—a “cloud” services operating system that provides developers with on-demand compute and storage capabilities. Using Windows Azure, GXS expects to speed deployment, reduce customer costs, and enhance scalability. -
Firm Uses Internet Service Bus to Enable Smart Grid for Dynamic Energy Savings
Invensys Operations Management is out to make it easier and less expensive for small electric utilities in the United States to participate in smart grid, an energy modernization program supported by the U.S. government. Utilities need a high-performance, low-cost way to distribute real-time pricing data to customers so that they can make smarter consumption decisions. Invensys responded by creating a smart grid communications platform using The Service Bus and Access Control Service, both part of the Windows Azure™ platform. The resulting platform enables utilities to immediately embrace smart grid services at affordable prices. Such services will help utility customers save money by using energy more wisely. Invensys developed its pilot solution in just three months as part of a plan to realize increased revenues from selling smart grid–compliant products and services. -
Vehicle Values Provider Saves $100,000 with Easy-to-Manage Software-plus-Services
Kelley Blue Book is a premier provider of vehicle pricing information to consumers, automotive dealers, governments, and the finance and insurance industries. The company developed its information-rich, high-traffic Web site using the Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 and supports it with two hosted data centers. In an effort to reduce hosting costs and ease management of its infrastructure, Kelley Blue Book decided to host and manage its Web site using a software-plus-services model. After evaluating software-plus-services solutions, the company implemented the Windows Azure™ platform—which proved to be a straightforward process. As a result, Kelley Blue Book is able to reduce capital expenditures for new hardware, increase its competitive advantage by focusing on delivering new features, save U.S.$100,000 annually in hosting costs, and use IT resources more strategically. -
Company Efficiently Delivers Advanced Forecasts with Scalable Software-plus-Services
Lokad is a software development company that delivers sales, demand, and call volume forecasts for more than 300 customers—from one-person eCommerce companies to multinational retailers. To improve its forecasting capabilities, the company developed advanced forecasting tools and models. However, the more powerful forecasting models required significantly more computing resources than the company had available. Lokad decided to implement its software-plus-services forecasting application on the Windows Azure™ platform—a quick, efficient process. As a result, Lokad reduced IT maintenance costs compared to traditional approaches, delivered more powerful and accurate forecasts to its customers, and improved its ability to expand into new markets. -
Microsoft IT Moves Auction Tool to the Cloud, Makes it Easier for Employees to Donate
Microsoft IT runs an online auction to raise funds for United Way during Microsoft’s annual Giving Campaign. Employees donate and bid on items throughout the campaign using an online auction tool created by Microsoft IT. In the last Giving Campaign, Microsoft IT migrated the auction tool to the Windows Azure™ platform so that the tool could scale to meet the demands of campaign traffic. -
Job-Listing Web Site Scales Up Solution, Reduces Costs by More Than U.S.$500,000
The job-listing Web site OCCMundial.com connects job seekers with opportunities and optimizes hiring processes for businesses. Headquartered in Mexico City, OCCMundial.com helps to fill more than 600,000 positions a year in Mexican and international job markets. To provide better value to its customers, the company developed a recommendation system it calls OCCMatch to match job openings to candidate resumes. OCCMundial.com wanted to scale up its OCCMatch recommendation system to connect 1.5 million resumes with 80,000 job listings, but its existing computing infrastructure lacked capacity to meet the demand. To avoid significant hardware and other infrastructure costs, OCCMundial.com used the Windows Azure™ platform to host OCCMatch through a Microsoft® data center, providing easy solution scalability and enhancing value for OCCMundial.com customers. -
Video Services Provider to Reduce Transcoding Costs Up to Half
Origin Digital, a video application service provider, wanted to increase transcoding throughput without increasing capital expense. To gain dynamic scalability within a familiar development environment, the company built an innovative transcoding application called Cloudcoder on the Windows Azure™ platform. The application will reduce compute costs and database administration time as well as expedite moves into new geographic markets. -
Outback Steakhouse Boosts Guests Loyalty with Facebook and Windows Azure
Outback Steakhouse wanted to encourage customers to visit its restaurants using social media to reach repeat and potential new guests. Outback decided to create a Facebook fan page offering the first 500,000 visitors to sign up as Outback fans a coupon for a free Bloom’ Onion appetizer. Outback partnered with Thuzi, a Registered Member of the Microsoft Partner Network, who considered hosting the application in one of its data centers but hesitated at the up-front expenses needed to support the hoped-for response. After exploring hosting services from Amazon and Google, Outback and Thuzi developed the application on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform, taking advantage of its less expensive infrastructure and scalability. -
Software Services Provider Delivers Cost-Effective E-Government Solution
Persistent Systems provides software development services that help enterprises and public sector customers enhance their offerings. One of the company’s primary offerings is an e-government solution that helps governments and agencies deliver services and interact with constituents electronically. However, the company’s ability to promote the solution was often limited by the IT infrastructure capacity of governments in developing regions. Persistent Systems needed a way to deliver its solution without requiring local governments to invest in new IT infrastructure and personnel. The company used the Windows Azure™ platform to deliver its e-governance applications on the Internet through a Microsoft® data center. Now Persistent Systems can offer its e-government solution in a high-availability environment while reducing capital and maintenance costs for itself and its customers. -
Financial Risk-Analysis Firm Enhances Capabilities with Dynamic Computing
RiskMetrics Group’s Risk Management Business delivers risk management services to the world’s leading asset managers, banks, and institutions to help them measure and model complex financial instruments. To meet increasing market demand for risk analysis, RiskMetrics needed to accommodate increasing peak loads on its computing infrastructure for specific periods of time. The company used the Windows Azure™ platform—an Internet-scale services platform hosted in Microsoft® data centers—to provide on-demand computing capacity for its analytics applications. Now RiskMetrics can complement its on-premise capabilities with a flexible, reliable solution that can support bursts in computing activity over short periods of time, deliver enhanced services for more customers, empower innovation, and provide the company with increased business agility. -
Siemens Expands Software Delivery Service, Significantly Reduces TCO
Siemens – a global powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering, operating in the industry, energy and healthcare sectors – has built a worldwide reputation for innovation and technical achievement. Siemens IT Solutions and Services, which manages IT for parent company Siemens AG and many Siemens customers, developed a system for remote service of more than 80,000 devices worldwide. An additional service enables its users to distribute software packages to devices spread around the globe through virtual private network connections. To make these software updates and installations more efficient, reduce costs, and deliver more complex software packages to more devices, Siemens is now able to use the Windows Azure™ platform for devices directly connected to the Internet. The company now can dynamically scale its global software distribution, while reducing costs, enhancing services, and avoiding significant new capital investment. -
Publishing Giant Creates Innovative Web Based Service for Small-Business Market
Two decades ago, Quark changed the course of traditional publishing with its QuarkXPress® desktop publishing software. Today, the company provides publishing solutions to customers around the world across multiple channels. To reach more customers in the huge but fragmented small-to-midsize business market, Quark wanted to offer a service combining the flexibility of Web-based computing and the richness of PC-based software. It used the Windows® Azure™ platform and Microsoft® development tools to create Quark Promote, a service through which customers use professionally designed templates to create customized marketing materials that can be picked up at a neighborhood printer or received by mail. The service lets Quark tap into the Web-to-print market, helps its business partners increase revenues, and provides customers with an easy, affordable way to create high-quality marketing materials. -
Software Developer Launches Highly Scalable Web Site Platform, Minimizes Costs
Sitemasher, developer of an innovative platform for building and managing Web sites, wanted to help Web professionals create scalable, data-driven Web sites faster, and at lower cost. The company also needed to lower its own systems infrastructure costs. Sitemasher used the Windows Azure™ platform to offer its application as a hosted service, delivering an efficient, highly available, and highly scalable Web site development and hosting environment to its customers. By hosting its application on Windows Azure through Microsoft® data centers, the company has minimized infrastructure costs and reduced ongoing maintenance. Finally, with no data centers of its own to manage, Sitemasher will refocus the time its development staff spent maintaining servers to improving and expanding the Sitemasher application, representing a time savings of approximately 20 percent. -
Software Firm Launches Business Contract Service with Lean Staff, Low Investment
Sopima, creator of an online solution for managing business contract life cycles, needed to minimize its capital investment to deliver a viable offering. It also wanted to offer an affordable monthly subscription service to gain new customers quickly. Using the Windows® Azure™ platform, the company hosts its application in Microsoft data centers, providing customers with fast response times and high scalability. With the solution, Sopima has removed barriers that would have otherwise prohibited its entry into competitive markets. The company limited its investment in infrastructure, and can focus on development rather than hardware administration. Sopima estimates that, without the Windows Azure platform, it would have had to hire additional full-time staff members at an annual cost of approximately U.S.$500,000. Its status as a Microsoft® Partner will lend Sopima credibility in a competitive marketplace. -
CRM Vendor Quickly Adapts to New Platform, Adds Global, Scalable Delivery Channel
SugarCRM provides open-source customer relationship management (CRM) software and focuses on its “Sugar Open Cloud” strategy meaning that the company makes its applications available for a variety of on-premises and hosted service platforms. The independent software vendor recently ported its application to the Windows Azure™ platform to enable its customers and value-added resellers to take advantage of real-time scalability, geographically dispersed Microsoft® data centers, and maximum data availability to gain high end performance without investing in additional infrastructure. The ease of deployment and pay-as-you-go pricing will also help customers control IT costs. Thanks to strong support for programming language interoperability within the Windows Azure platform, SugarCRM was able to complete the porting process with two engineers in about two weeks. -
Solution Developer Expects to Boost Efficiency with Software-plus-Services Strategy
The Information Store® helps global petroleum companies access exploration and production data irrespective of where it resides and presents it in a useful and familiar form. To maintain its competitive advantage, the company was eager to find a cost-effective way to extend its industry-leading PetroTrek® solutions to independent oil producers. The company evaluated two “software as a service” offerings, and selected the Windows Azure™ platform—an Internet-scale “cloud services” platform that is hosted in Microsoft data centers—as the foundation for its online Digital Oilfield solution, along with Microsoft® SQL Azure, Microsoft Silverlight™ browser plug-in technology, and Bing™ maps for enterprise. The company expects to increase operational efficiency of its customers by reducing upfront capital costs, reduce deployment cycle from months to days, and lower ongoing operating expenses. -
Ticket Seller Finds Ideal Business Solution in Hosted Computing Platform
New Zealand–based TicketDirect International has grown into a major ticketing service for venues in Australia and New Zealand. The company’s focus on excellent customer service led it to look for a better way to handle peak system loads during major event ticket sales. Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Intergen, TicketDirect has begun redesigning its system to work from a “cloud computing” environment using the Windows Azure™ platform. The company is rebuilding its customer application as a Windows Azure application and migrating its data to a Microsoft SQL Azure™ database. By moving to an off-premises, cloud solution, TicketDirect is able to easily and cost-efficiently scale its computing resources in response to real-time demand while simultaneously giving up the cost of maintaining its own hardware. This move frees IT resources to focus on more customer-centered need -
Trade Data Service Scales Online Solution to Global Level with ”Cloud” Services Model
TradeFacilitate helps importers and exporters in the European Union to exchange trade data using a paper-free online system. To meet new regulation requirements for preshipment data exchange in the United States, TradeFacilitate sought a solution that would permit the company to scale its applications to a significantly larger market without proportionately adding more personnel and technology resources. The company adopted the Windows Azure™ platform and quickly migrated the code base from its primary application to a cloud services model—hosting and managing its Web application and services on the Internet through Microsoft data centers. With Windows Azure, TradeFacilitate quickly developed a scalable and reliable solution that helped the company improve its ability to focus on delivering new services to customers. -
Combinatorial Auction Provider Scales Up Quickly, Saves Costs with Cloud Services
Tradeslot specializes in designing and building large scale business-to-business and government-to-business (G2B) auctions platforms; its partner company, Adslot, uses the same auction platform to auction online advertising space. The companies use computation-heavy combinatorial auction algorithms to manage their complex conditional bid processes. However, with a lack of compute power with its existing infrastructure, the companies found it necessary to manually add constraints to auctions. In addition, the companies wanted to reduce capital costs and IT resources required to set up new server hardware for customers. Tradeslot and Adslot implemented Windows Azure™ and, as a result, reduced capital costs for customers—from U.S.$60,000 to only $1,000 for each customer, improved their ability to scale up and improve services for customers, saved critical IT resources, and delivered a solution their customers can trust. -
Security Firm Helps Customers Create Highly Secure Hosted Infrastructure Solutionsa
VeriSign wanted to provide customers who deliver services on hosted infrastructures with the same highly secure encryption technology used in on-premises data centers. The company partnered with Microsoft to provide Windows Azure™ platform customers with enhanced protection for critical business data. With VeriSign® SSL Certificates on Windows Azure, customers receive an added layer of online security, while reducing management and maintenance costs.
