Clear Channel Communications

Clear Channel Communications Cuts Code 84 Percent, Speeds Interface 400 Percent

The software that Clear Channel Communications executives used to optimize and obtain ad rates was increasingly difficult to troubleshoot and extend to meet business needs. In response, the company is creating a new version using the latest Microsoft® technologies. With the new solution, the code base has shrunk by 84 percent, responsiveness to business needs will be almost immediate, and performance is up as much as 400 percent.

 

Situation

Clear Channel Communications, a leader in radio and outdoor advertising, uses technologies from high-definition radio to digital billboards to maintain its market position.

With that appreciation for technology, LAN International (a technology subsidiary of Clear Channel) knew when it was time to overhaul its VIERO Best Rate software for rate and yield management. That business-critical software is used by thousands of employees at the company’s more than 800 U.S.-based radio stations. Advertising managers use it to set optimal ad rates; advertising executives use it to obtain the most current rates; and station managers use it to track the performance of their advertising sales departments.

But the seven-year-old software was showing its age. Customizations and updates made over the years had caused the code base to grow to an unwieldy size. Developers were spending an increasing portion of their time maintaining the software and troubleshooting issues such as memory leaks. As a result, business-driven enhancements and updates were increasingly difficult and time-consuming to implement; major new features took up to six months to introduce.

For example, the software calculated rates in part on the basis of standard “day parts,” the predefined segments of the day during which a commercial was intended to air. But with Clear Channel’s stations operating in different markets, with different competitive environments and different needs, stations wanted to be able to define their own day parts. It took five developers six months to put that business enhancement into production.

Clear Channel wanted to be able to respond more quickly to business needs.

Solution

To achieve that greater agility, Clear Channel is using Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Suite to re-create VIERO Best Rate as a Web application with a smaller and more manageable code base, greater performance, and more extensibility.

Because it is becoming faster and easier to implement enhancements and extensions, we will be able to do so more frequently. Marwan Shaban Development Manager, Clear Channel Communications

“We’re standardized on Microsoft technologies, so using Visual Studio 2008 was a given,” says Marwan Shaban, Development Manager at Clear Channel. “Even so, Visual Studio 2008 and related Microsoft technologies give us many options for writing a Web application. We chose a combination of ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, LINQ, and Silverlight™, using each in an area where its strengths make it the logical choice.”

For example, the solution moves much of the business logic out of stored procedures in a Microsoft SQL Server® 2000–based database and into C# managed code. Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) is used in the middle tier, and C# code runs in the Web browser, where instant feedback is required yet business logic has to be applied. Shaban expects to upgrade that database to SQL Server 2008.

“The use of SQL Server 2008 will enable us to take advantage of native data compression and sparse columns to reduce database size and fit more rows in a page,” he says.

The application interface gives users a current view of available advertising inventory and rates—and gives authorized users the ability to manage rates. Shaban and his colleagues plan to use ASP.NET AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and the Microsoft Silverlight browser plug-in to create a sliding control that users can push up or down to display real-time changes in rate and inventory information. The control will minimize the need for roundtrips to the server for new data.

To develop the solution, Clear Channel is using Visual Studio Team System 2008 technologies, including automated Web test and load test. The developers use the technologies to monitor how changes to the code and to the number of concurrent users affect the application’s performance.

Benefits

Shaban says that, thanks to the Visual Studio Team System 2008 development system, Clear Channel is meeting its goal to produce a smaller version of the VIERO Best Rate application—one that is easier for IT personnel to maintain and extend, and that performs faster for business users.

The code base for VIERO Best Rate has shrunk 84 percent, from 329,000 lines of code to just 52,000. Shaban attributes the reduction to the use of C#, LINQ, and related technologies, and to the opportunity to rewrite the code. The number of project files has likewise experienced a major reduction, of 61 percent. And the database has been compressed by 90 percent, with the number of tables reduced by 80 percent.

“Moving from ADO and C++ auto-generated code for each stored procedure to native .NET code has had a large effect in reducing the size of our solution,” says Shaban. “Less code means less complexity and greater maintainability.”

It also means faster development. “I remember working on projects of a similar scale that took four times the effort using older technologies,” says Alan Gajadhar, Lead Software Engineer, Clear Channel Communications. “AJAX technologies, advanced IntelliSense™ for JavaScript and the myriad of other useful features, enabled me to create an efficient, highly intuitive product in a quarter of the time.”

The benefits of the smaller, more effective code base show up at Clear Channel in many ways. For example, the company has been able to reduce the development staff devoted to the solution by 50 percent, reassigning developers to produce similar software gains elsewhere. Also, the nightly batch process used to take more than six hours to complete. Now, it runs five times faster, completing in a little more than an hour.

“The nightly process was barely finishing by the time the East Coast markets were starting up for the morning,” recalls Shaban. “It was affecting people’s work, their productivity. Now, we’re not in danger of that happening anymore. There’s another, practical way that the faster process helps us: We have the flexibility to add new features to run overnight because the process has the spare time to accommodate new features. Before, with the process barely completing in time, our options were limited.”

The smaller code base—and the Microsoft technologies that have made that smaller size possible—also encourages the development of new features and enhancements, and facilitates faster, more effective troubleshooting of the solution.

“Because it is becoming faster and easier to implement enhancements and extensions, we will be able to do so more frequently,” says Shaban. “In the past, when the business side had a need, it typically had to wait weeks or months for implementation. With this new version of our rate application, we are able to respond to business needs almost immediately.”

Business users benefit from this greater responsiveness from IT by being able to work, and serve their accounts, more productively. They gain similar benefits from the performance of the main Web site, which is up to 400 percent faster than before. The enterprise home page, for example, loads in just 5 seconds, down from 19 seconds. The “station” page loads in just 4 seconds, down from 16 seconds.

“Our business users obviously benefit in greater productivity when the Web site is more responsive to them,” says Shaban. “But there are other benefits as well. Because their productivity is up because of the new solution, users are more likely to utilize it, so adoption rates will go up and users will take advantage of the processes we’ve created for them. And when pages load faster, the burden on our hardware is reduced. We expect to reduce our Web servers by 33 percent, from three to two, because of the solution.”

Looking ahead, the anticipated use of Silverlight will also facilitate smaller, faster, and more convenient downloads—Shaban estimates up to four times faster—for users who may be working from computers without the latest version of the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Shaban expects that Clear Channel will be able to reuse the code it’s creating for VIERO Best Rate in future applications, thereby increasing the return on investment and speeding future development. And he expects to add value to the business by enabling advertising sales executives to use the VIERO software in new ways. For example, Clear Channel has already tested a version of the VIERO software running on Windows Mobile® powered phones.

"We are excited about the benefits this new code base will bring,” says Matthew Ferry, Sr., Vice President, Software Development, LAN International. “Seeing some of these new technologies, like Silverlight, put to use in one of our products will help us begin to see more opportunities to improve other VIERO products as well."

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 organizations 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 with Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Expression® Suite. With Visual Studio 2008, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.

For more information about Visual Studio 2008, go to:
msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio

For More Information

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For more information about products and services from LAN International (a Clear Channel Communications company), visit the Web sites at:
www.lanint.com and
www.clearchannel.com