4-page Case Study - Posted 3/27/2009

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Cumulux

Firm Cuts the Cost of Phone-Based Data Access by 60 Percent with Cloud Offering

With more mobile workers depending on smartphones to stay in touch with work, enterprises are eager to find an easy way to give workers secure access to line-of-business (LOB) applications through their mobile phones. Cumulux helps companies meet that need with mPortal, an application that integrates LOB applications and presents the results through a smartphone interface. To broaden mPortal’s appeal, Cumulux converted it to a “cloud-based” service using the Azure™ Services Platform. With a software-plus-services approach, workers get anytime, anywhere access to business data through their phones, and their companies reduce costs by about 60 percent by avoiding on-premises installation. The cloud approach reduces mPortal deployment time by 75 percent and accommodates unlimited scalability of customer data. Microsoft® data centers offer high levels of data security.
   
    
   

Situation

Cumulux, a software and services firm based in Kirkland, Washington, offers solutions that enable enterprises to benefit from “cloud,” or Internet-based, computing. The company offers a suite of collaboration and content management applications that integrate on-premises software with cloud services. Cumulux was founded in 2008 and has eight employees, who work between Kirkland; Chicago, Illinois; and Chennai, India.

Its founders launched Cumulux with the initial goal of helping mobile professionals access business data that was locked away in corporate line-of-business (LOB) applications. In a typical enterprise, vital business content resides in a variety of applications, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and corporate messaging systems, as well as in documents stored on file servers. As more workers have started working outside the office and moving between the office, supplier locations, and customer sites, mobile devices have become a critical conduit to enterprise data.

“Notebook computers were the mobile device of choice five years ago, but today it’s smartphones,” says Paddy Srinivasan, Chief Executive Officer of Cumulux. “Smartphones have become very powerful, and knowledge workers want to do far more with their phones than just check e mail and browse the Web.” Ideally, users want to access data in LOB systems from their phones and leave the notebook computer in the office.

For example, a sales manager might check in with 10 key customers each week. Before meeting with each one, she wants to get updates on the customer’s recent orders with her company, see whether there are any deals in progress, learn of any open customer-service issues, and even find out whether any organizational changes have occurred at the customer. This information typically resides in four or five different LOB systems, perhaps an order-entry system, an ERP system, a CRM system, and even the company e-mail system. When at her desk, the sales manager can toggle between all those applications, which are installed in the corporate data center and securely accessible from her desktop computer. But today, when she’s out of the office, she has to phone colleagues and have them look up the information or establish a virtual private network (VPN) connection between a notebook computer and the corporate servers.

“Nearly all major LOB applications have recently come out with mobile versions, suitable for use with a smartphone, but the interface is quite different from the desktop interface and requires user training,” Srinivasan says. “Also, users have to switch between the applications, which requires multiple logons and is difficult to do from a smartphone.”

Also, in order to ensure that users have secure access only to the data that’s appropriate for them, IT professionals must configure the LOB applications for mobile access for each user, which is time-consuming and expensive. A Gartner study (“PDA and Smartphone TCO: 2007 Update,” May 2007, available at www.gartner.com) showed that it costs about U.S.$1,000 per mobile device, per year, to phone-enable LOB applications. That figure includes the cost of licensing mobile versions of LOB applications, enabling mobile extensions and extending the enterprise security infrastructure to the smartphone environment, and training users.

Organizations also have security concerns about exposing business-critical data on mobile devices. Because they are so small, mobile phones are more prone to accidental loss than notebook computers, and one phone in the wrong hands can leave business-critical systems vulnerable to malicious hacking.

Solution

Cumulux founders decided that the first product they developed would attempt to solve the problems of providing access to applications over mobile devices. In 2008, they created an application integration and mobile delivery solution called mPortal, which provides simplified smartphone access to LOB systems. The mPortal solution integrates data from multiple LOB systems and presents it to users through a single interface on their smartphones.

Cumulux initially developed mPortal using the Microsoft® .NET Framework and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 portal software. Customers installed and ran mPortal in their data centers on their own servers. Soon, however, customers began asking Cumulux to host the application for them. Cumulux did not have the capital to build out a giant hosting infrastructure, nor did it want to get into the hosting business.

Using only a smartphone, workers have instant access to up-to-date enterprise data, which drives down decision-making time, improves decision quality, and enhances … productivity. Paddy Srinivasan Chief Executive Officer, Cumulux

Microsoft-Hosted Solution

When Cumulux learned about the Azure™ Services Platform from Microsoft, it was immediately interested. “We are not a big company, and we wanted to avoid the capital expense of building a hosting infrastructure,” Srinivasan says. “Plus, having Microsoft host our solution for customers gave us a way to elastically provision our service to better fit a range of customer needs.”

The Azure Services Platform is an Internet-scale “cloud” services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. It provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used to build new applications that run from the cloud or to enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice of building Web applications; applications running on desktop computers, servers, and mobile devices; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both online and on-premises software. Microsoft believes that using this software-plus-services approach maximizes choice, capabilities, and flexibility for customers.

“In addition to relieving us of the need to host mPortal for customers, the Azure Services Platform enabled us to completely change our business model and win customers previously not available to us,” Srinivasan says. “Whereas we initially charged for our customer-premises product using a standard software-licensing fee structure, the Azure Services Platform enabled us to offer our software on a per-user fee model, which meant we could offer mPortal to smaller customers. A per-user subscription fee also resonates well with customers of any size in this economic environment.”

Using the Azure Services Platform, Cumulux was first in its market category with a hybrid, or software-plus-services, solution that combines on-premises software and cloud-based services. “Many companies are interested in bridging on-premises and cloud-based data but don’t know how to do it,” says Ranjith Ramakrishnan, Chief Technology Officer for Cumulux. “With the Azure Services Platform, we instantly had a way to do this and relieve our customers of an expensive integration effort.”

Before settling on the Azure Services Platform, Cumulux investigated Salesforce.com and other Internet-based software services but found the Azure Services Platform to be “far more powerful than what’s available from any other vendor,” Ramakrishnan says. “The Azure Services Platform offers an entire application development platform rather than just ‘canned’ online applications. We could take our existing .NET Framework skills and migrate our existing application to the cloud, being productive from day one.”

Complete Suite of Online Services

Cumulux used several components of the Azure Services Platform to port mPortal to the cloud, and also to host the application and data for customers. It used Windows® Azure, a cloud services operating system, to provide the development, service hosting, and service management environment for its development effort. It used Microsoft .NET Services to obtain access control to secure its application, a service bus for communicating across applications and services, and hosted workflow execution. These hosted services enabled Cumulux developers to easily federate mPortal to span on-premises environments and the cloud. Cumulux uses Microsoft SQL Data Services to provide Web-based data storage and query processing. In the future, Cumulux will use Live Services, along with the Access Control Service of .NET Services, to aggregate content from a variety of enterprise systems.

It took Cumulux just three months to migrate mPortal to the cloud using the Azure Services Platform; once the application was migrated, Cumulux discontinued the original on-premises version of the product. “It took us a couple of weeks to familiarize ourselves with the underpinnings of the Azure Services Platform, but we could use 90 percent of the skills we already had,” Ramakrishnan says.

mPortal in the Cloud

Today, Cumulux mPortal is a software-plus-services application that provides a unified and contextual view of enterprise content to knowledge workers on the go. This enterprise content includes documents, business intelligence data, and LOB applications such as ERP and CRM systems.

To make all this content accessible from mPortal, enterprise business analysts first determine which enterprise content and processes they want to enable on mobile devices. For example, it’s impractical from a usability perspective to make all 100 processes in a CRM system accessible from a smartphone; maybe only 5 are critical for mobile workers. Or, on a desktop computer, users may see 50 attributes of a customer entity, but on a smartphone they might see only 3.

After performing this two-week modeling process, which is accelerated by the use of a Cumulux administrative tool that runs online (on Office SharePoint Server 2007), the business analyst defines views into the LOBs and then

Cumulux mPortal aggregation software running on the mServer integrates data from corporate line-of-business applications and makes it available to users through mPortal client software running on a mobile phone. Aggregated LOB data, LOB access rules, and, optionally, even LOBs themselves are stored in the cloud in Microsoft SQL Data Services.

Once a customer has determined data access rules, Cumulux connects the company’s LOB systems—which can be housed in the customer’s data center or in the cloud—with its cloud-based mServer. The mServer runs the mPortal server-side software, which includes an aggregation engine that integrates all the LOB data into a single, simplified view. This single view is displayed on user smartphones through the mPortal client software. Users are not aware of which LOBs the data came from; they know only that they have instant, easy access to the data they need to make quick decisions.

Cumulux uses Microsoft SQL Data Services to store the aggregated LOB data and the LOB views and roles. Customers can use SQL Data Services to store even the LOBs themselves. “Using the enterprise features of Microsoft .NET Services, mPortal bridges the gap between data that resides inside enterprise data centers and content that resides in the cloud,” Ramakrishnan says. “With the powerful Azure Services Platform, we were able to completely migrate our on-premises application to the cloud. The only on-premises component is the client application that runs on the phone.”

Benefits

By using the Azure Services Platform to migrate mPortal to a software-plus-services approach, Cumulux created a way for its enterprise customers to give their mobile workers anytime, anywhere access to LOB data, at minimal cost to the enterprise. With mPortal in the cloud, Cumulux can get customers up and running in two weeks versus two months, and its existing support staff can support five times as many customers as they could with an on-premises delivery model. The software-plus-services approach accommodates infinite scalability, and hosting applications and data in Microsoft data centers provides very high levels of security for customer data.

Anytime, Anywhere Data Access

The mPortal solution gives mobile employees fast, easy access to both on-premises enterprise content and cloud-based applications, which enables them to make fast, accurate decisions when out of the office, away from corporate systems. Also, mPortal unifies disparate enterprise content and makes the origin of the data transparent to the user, thus enabling a seamless experience through a simple, uncluttered interface.

“Using only a smartphone, workers have instant access to up-to-date enterprise data, which drives down decision-making time, improves decision quality, and enhances the productivity of knowledge workers,” Srinivasan says.

Customer Costs Reduced 60 Percent

The mPortal solution enables enterprises to roll out a mobile content strategy with minimal IT investment. By taking advantage of the Azure Services Platform, mPortal delivers a powerful portal application suite for a very low cost. “Customers can deploy mobile solutions without data center investments,” Srinivasan says. “The average company lowers costs by 60 percent by running mPortal in the cloud rather than on-premises. Plus, in the current economic environment, enabling IT staffs to convert capital expenses to ongoing operational expenses enables organizations to better justify technology investments.”

Deployment 75 Percent Faster

Using the software-plus-services approach, Cumulux is able to quickly and cost-effectively bridge the customer’s on-premises and cloud data—something that customers want although they’re often unsure how to accomplish it. “Now, customers don’t have to worry about implementing a hybrid environment themselves,” Ramakrishnan says. “We do the integration for them. With software-plus-services, we can get our customers up and running on mPortal in two weeks versus two months—a 75 percent time-to-market improvement over on-premises deployment.”

Support Costs Reduced by a Factor of Five

Once Cumulux deploys a customer on mPortal, it needs to provide ongoing support. “Support is another area where the Azure Services Platform really shines,” Srinivasan says. “By offering mPortal as a software-plus-services offering, we won’t have to worry about patching, load-balancing, and securing servers. With our original on-premises deployment model, we allocated one Cumulux support professional per customer, or 2,000 phones. With the Azure Services Platform, we can support 10,000 phones per support professional—five times as many customers per support staff member.”

Scalability to Accommodate New Data, Applications, Devices

The client base for mPortal is diverse and ranges from Fortune 100 organizations to midsize businesses in verticals such as finance, utilities, and consumer goods. As a result, the data that mPortal manages and pushes to mobile devices is also very diverse. The flexible data model schema of SQL Data Services enables a scalable, multitenant architecture that caters to the requirements of this diverse client base.

“Enterprise applications are critical assets that have evolved over a number of years and provide valuable insights into the business processes of an enterprise,” Srinivasan says. “By using SQL Data Services to deploy a metadata-driven application, we can provision access to new enterprise applications with no coding. This enables companies to reuse existing assets and development resources by extending corporate data to new devices and usage scenarios.”

Using a software-plus-services approach, Cumulux can roll out an unlimited number of customers with no concern about scaling its development and test infrastructure or the infrastructure that customers would need to run its software on their premises. Because mPortal runs completely in the cloud, and customers can store their data in the cloud, scalability is incredibly cost-effective and barrier-free.

Highest Level of Security

With their business-critical data hosted in Microsoft data centers, customers have not only an infinitely scalable solution, but also a security-enhanced solution. “Both Cumulux and our customers feel more secure in having Microsoft host our data,” Srinivasan says. “Cumulux doesn’t have to meet customer service-level agreements, and customers don’t have to worry about creating and maintaining security infrastructures. The fact that Microsoft is making a large investment in each data center is a great talking point for us.”

A software-plus-services approach also eliminates the need for enterprises to create virtual private network connections into their corporate data stores. “VPN access methods often force enterprises to create double points of entry into their LOBs, which creates security vulnerabilities,” Srinivasan says. “We eliminate the need for VPN connections and make security completely transparent to users.”

Software + Services
Software-plus-services is an industry shift driven by the fast-growing recognition that combining Internet services with client and server software can deliver exciting new opportunities. Microsoft is dedicated to helping individuals and businesses take advantage of these opportunities. By bringing together the best of both software and services, we maximize capabilities, choice, and flexibility for our customers. The broad software-plus-services approach unites multiple industry phenomena including software as a service, service-oriented development, and the Web 2.0 user experience under a common umbrella.

For more information about software-plus-services, go to:
www.microsoft.com/softwareplusservices

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 Cumulux products and services, call (425) 558-0492 or visit the Web site at:
www.cumulux.com