4-page Case Study - Posted 10/21/2008

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NeoGeo New Media

Digital Media Asset Management Solution Gains Scalability with SQL Data Services

In a world that continually produces more images, videos, and other digital content, NeoGeo and its application neoMediaCenter .NET helps its customers store and manage their digital assets. Rich media content requires lots of storage space, so NeoGeo was looking for the most scalable and cost effective database solutions for its customers. The company plans to offer its product with cloud-based relational (to support content queries) storage using Microsoft® SQL Data Services (SDS), part of the Microsoft Services Platform. NeoGeo will use the cloud-based solution to provide its customers with seamless scalability and lower deployment and management costs. Using SDS will benefit NeoGeo by reducing by half the development time of its storage-based solutions, and enhance its sales opportunities.

SQL Data Services really is about the future of software vendors and the way many applications will be architected and developed in the coming years. Marc Höppner Managing Director, NeoGeo

Situation

NeoGeo is an innovative leader in the field of enterprise database file systems and digital asset management. The company’s neoMediaCenter .NET is a software application to store and manage digital media assets in a queryable relational environment.

A Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, NeoGeo has long used the Microsoft Application Platform to create and deploy its robust and scalable solution for finding, converting and distributing all kinds of files in a secure and easy-to-use environment within a corporate intranet, an extranet, or across the Internet through browser-based access, with no plug-ins or extra client software required.

The company’s media asset management system has proven popular with customers ranging from multinational enterprises, to departmental and small business operations that rely on media resources. One challenge NeoGeo has faced is helping its customers, whether large or small, find the best hosting solution for media storage. The company’s customers need an easily scalable relational, queryable, database solution that is inexpensive to deploy and manage.

“Large enterprises generally store the media that our application manages on their own IT infrastructure,” says Marc Höppner, Managing Director of NeoGeo. “But for smaller organizations determining the best, and most cost effective, database hosting solution has often been a problem. We don’t want expensive hardware or an expensive hosting solution to hinder adoption of our media asset management application.”

Solution

NeoGeo is preparing to offer its neoMediaCenter .NET with a relational database solution based on Microsoft SQL Data Services (SDS), part of Microsoft Services. SDS offers highly scalable and Internet-facing distributed database services in the cloud for storing and processing relational queries. It helps developers create and provision new applications with REST and SOAP based Web protocols. The services are built on robust Microsoft SQL Server® database and Windows Server® technologies, providing high availability and security.

Höppner is excited about SDS and the Microsoft Services Platform, noting: "SQL Data Services really is about the future of software vendors and the way many applications will be architected and developed in the coming years.”

NeoGeo Solution Architecture
NeoGeo uses a three-tier architecture that includes:

• Web-based Interface. Users access neoMediaCenter .NET through a desktop browser. Upon full deployment, NeoGeo will host its application in the cloud.
• Application Tier. NeoGeo provides the middle-tier code for managing and accessing digital assets. The NeoGeo application tier provides connectivity to the data stored on SDS which is hosted by Microsoft Global Foundation Services datacenters.
• Data Tier. All media assets managed by neoMediaCenter .NET are hosted on a dedicated instance of SDS in the cloud.

Benefits

NeoGeo will be able to offer its customers seamless scalability by enabling users of its neoMediaCenter .NET to store digital assets using SDS and the rest of the Microsoft Services Platform. Providing cloud-based storage will also provide 50 percent faster development, lower deployment and operational costs, and enhanced sales opportunities.

Seamless Scalability
SDS running as part of the Microsoft Services Platform, and hosted by the massive datacenters of Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services, provides NeoGeo with the scalability it needs to meet the needs of large and small customers.

“SQL Data Services gives us seamless scalability,” says Höppner. “Because SQL Data Services is hosted on Global Foundation Services we know that we can scale as large as any global enterprise could need. But just as importantly, we can use SDS to scale down to meet the needs of our very smallest customers as well. At the small end, SDS enables us to offer a very affordable service because the customer just pays for the resources they need.”

Regardless of the size of the company when it begins to use neoMediaCenter .NET, Höppner values the ease with which his customers will be able to seamlessly scale to meet their growth. “We are able to free our customers from the IT concerns they would normally face,” Höppner says. “They don’t have to purchase a SAN nor worry about how much SAN space they would need to provide.”

50 Percent Faster Development
NeoGeo anticipates development time savings of about half in creating media storage solutions for its customers because the database is supported by Microsoft SDS and Global Foundation Services.

“With SDS providing database storage in the cloud, our programming model becomes much easier,” Höppner says. “SQL Data Services drives down the cost of software development. We should be able to eliminate at least 50 percent of our development time for the storage side of our solutions.”

Lower Deployment and Operational Costs
Höppner sees the low deployment and operational costs of solutions based on SDS as major benefits NeoGeo can extend to its customers. “Our customers can deploy SDS-based neoMediaCenter .NET solutions without worrying about capital expenditures or operational expenditures,” says Höppner. “This removes barriers for new customers, and also provides a great lower total cost of ownership story for departmental enterprise customers who are currently relying on internal IT staff and infrastructure to support their media database needs.”

The benefits become even stronger, Höppner notes, when looking at deploying applications, in addition to data storage, on the cloud. “The more our customers can move applications and database stores to SDS and the rest of the Microsoft Services Platform, the less they need to worry about managing IT resources, and the concerns that go with this such as ensuring high availability, optimizing performance, and managing data backups.”

Because SQL Data Services is hosted on Global Foundation Services we know that we can scale as large as any global enterprise could need. But just as importantly, we can use SDS to scale down to meet the needs of our very smallest customers as well. Marc Höppner Managing Director, NeoGeo

“Cloud-based services open the door for a new generation of solutions,” says Höppner. “Global enterprises, for example, often have difficulty with geo-location of resources. If a company wants to globally roll out a new program, today there can be bottlenecks in supporting simultaneous delivery around the world. Using SDS and the Microsoft Services Platform we could enable our neoMediaCenter .NET customers to use localized services from Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services so that customers in the Asia Pacific region, for example, would be served from local cloud resources.”

Höppner notes that coordination of geo-location could be done from within the application, saying: “We would examine the IP address and assign the viewer to the appropriately localized version of the media asset, which would be hosted at the best delivery point within the Global Foundation Services cloud.”

The sales opportunities continue across the spectrum. Höppner sees lower total cost of ownership as a benefit that could apply to even the largest global customers when the internal costs of deploying and maintaining an IT infrastructure are compared to the cost of obtaining the same services using the cloud-based services of SDS and the Microsoft Service Platform. At the other end of the scale, Höppner sees cloud-based services as opening the door for the very smallest businesses—those with just one or two employees, but significant media assets to manage, such as commercial photographers, videotaping services, and small marketing organizations.

“We’ve found that these small operations have the same digital management needs as larger organizations,” says Höppner. “And a small number of employees doesn’t preclude needing terabytes of database storage. With SDS, we can offer the services they need at a price point they can easily afford.”

Summary
In summary, NeoGeo is preparing to deploy its neoMediaCenter .NET solution using SDS and the rest of the Microsoft Service Platform to provide its customers with solutions that will be easier to deploy and manage, while providing seamless scalability.

Azure Services Platform
The Azure™ Services Platform provides an excellent foundation for expanding product and service offerings. The Azure components include:

• Windows Azure. Windows Azure is a development, run-time and control environment that is scalable, flexible, secure and Interoperable.
• Microsoft SQL Services. SQL Services is a suite of cloud-based SQL Server data platform capabilities. The first of these capabilities is SQL Data Services, which offers Internet-facing database service for relational queries.
• Microsoft.NET Services. Microsoft .NET Services is a suite of Web services for customers with integration and business-to-business collaboration requirements. These services include workflow, access control, and service bus connectivity.
• Live Services. Live Services is a comprehensive set of Web services that represent the core functionality of Windows Live (includes Windows Live Messenger, Live Search, and many more).

For more information about the Azure services platform portfolio, go to: www.azure.com

Microsoft SQL Services
Microsoft SQL Services extends SQL Server capabilities in the cloud as Web-based services. SQL Services enables organizations to store data from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents. SQL Services will deliver a rich set of integrated services for relational database, search, reporting, analytics and data synchronization with mobile users, remote offices and business partners. The first of these SQL Services available today is database services called SQL Data Services.

For more information about SQL Services, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/dataservices/default.mspx  

For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about NeoGeo products and services, call +49 4121 8025 0 or visit the Web site at: www.neogeo.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published October 2008