2 page Case Study - Posted 3/17/2008
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Web 2.0 Startup Boosts Business with Affordable Development Tools
Huddle.net provides business-class online collaboration spaces. As a new company, it had to get its product to market fast, but also use trusted development tools to gain credibility with its target customers. By joining Microsoft® Empower for ISVs, Huddle.net accessed a full suite of Microsoft applications at minimal cost. Its development team created the Huddle.net Web site by using the Microsoft .NET Framework with ASP.NET, and the company now has a fast-growing customer base.
Business Needs
Huddle.net is a new Web 2.0 business that provides online collaboration spaces for diverse organisations, including government bodies, enterprise businesses, and charities. Subscribers share ideas, documents, revisions, and files securely across the Web. Huddle.net has grown quickly since it was established in 2006, and the company now employs 16 people across offices in London and Prague.
As a startup in a competitive industry, Huddle.net had to get its Web application up-and-running quickly. At the same time, the application had to be stable and robust before it went live. Andy McLoughlin, Product Director, Huddle.net, says: “Speed to market was very important, but our target customers don’t tolerate instability or security glitches, so we had to get the site right first time. We needed to use development tools that enterprise businesses know and trust.”
With little capital available, McLoughlin had to find a cost-effective software development solution. He was also keen to encourage external development for the site by releasing an application programming interface (API). “We believe that the user community should drive changes to the site. We wanted to make an open API available as early as possible, to get third-party developers involved,” he says.
“We also knew that it wasn’t enough to get a cutting-edge site to market—we had to keep innovating. Our subscribers pay monthly, and if they don’t see regular improvements, they’ll go elsewhere. We aim to release new features every two weeks through our agile development process, so we needed a flexible, easy-to-use framework,” says McLoughlin.
Solution
McLoughlin looked for a partner to provide the trusted development tools Huddle.net needed at an affordable price. “We talked to a lot of businesses about the development tools they rely on. Most said that they trust Microsoft .NET for reliability and ease of use. A lot of startups use open source frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or PHP, partly because they are inexpensive, but we decided to use .NET because it gave us immediate credibility with our target customers,” he says.
In May 2007, McLoughlin’s research led Huddle.net to join Microsoft Empower for ISVs, a programme where startups access Microsoft business applications at reduced prices. Says McLoughlin: “Originally, we thought the Microsoft applications were out of our price range, but joining Empower for ISVs made it inexpensive to use the latest Microsoft technologies.”
For an annual payment of £260, Huddle.net gained all the development tools it needed to create an advanced solution based on Microsoft technologies. Key products in the development process were:
- Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system
- Windows Server® 2003 operating system
- Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 database software
The company’s development team set to work coding the Huddle.net application by using Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 in Visual Studio 2005. They then quickly created a broadly interoperable API for the site, taking advantage of Windows Communication Foundation within the .NET Framework 3.0.
The Empower programme gives members access to the latest versions of Microsoft applications. In January 2008, Huddle.net upgraded to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Windows Server 2008, at no extra cost. By using Visual Studio 2008, the company’s developers easily transferred the ASP.NET 2.0 code for the Huddle.net Web site to ASP.NET 3.5. Says McLoughlin: “We upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 because of its integrated support for .NET 3.5, which offers us many useful features such as Visual C# 3.0 extensions and Microsoft IntelliSense. Integrated debugging of the Microsoft .NET libraries is a bonus.”
Benefits
Using Microsoft technology, Huddle.net went from business plan to revenue generation in a matter of months. McLoughlin says: “The cost of joining Microsoft Empower for ISVs was small, but the business benefits were huge. By becoming a member, we gave our developers all the tools they needed to create the site we envisaged.” The development team used the Microsoft .NET Framework to efficiently build a Web site that attracted valuable, satisfied customers from day one. As a member of the Empower programme, the company continues to innovate.
- Huddle.net quickly brought its cutting-edge Web site to market, moving the business into revenue generation.
- High-value customers were attracted by the site’s security and stability.
- The company made the most of its capital with affordable licensing from Microsoft.
- The business gained credibility with its target audience by partnering with Microsoft and using a trusted development framework.
- The company’s development team maintains excitement about the site by using the flexible .NET Framework to design new features.
- Developers work more efficiently using new features in the .NET Framework 3.5.
- Third parties add value to the site by using the API to integrate their own applications.
- Huddle.net accesses latest Microsoft technologies through the Empower programme, keeping it ahead of the competition.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is the world's most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows®-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2008 helps organisations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. Interaction between developers and designers is enhanced through the use of Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Expression® Studio. With Visual Studio 2008, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.
For more information about Visual Studio 2008, go to:
www.msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published March 2008
