Founded in San Francisco in 2011, Sipree is a cloud-based service provider that makes it simple for Global 2000 companies and governments to pay consumers, partners, vendors, and affiliates across the world. Sipree solutions connect customers to alternative payment networks such as PayPal, PopMoney, ClearXchange and others providing the necessary integration, business rule logic, and payment accessories.

Technically Compatible is an innovative cloud-based service for testing candidates for IT roles. Created by Microsoft Partner The Test Factory Group on Windows Azure, it is underpinning the firm’s continued growth worldwide. It is resulting in enhanced service, performance, reputation building, and revenues for the group, which already assesses staff for jobs in 150 countries.

At The Races provides live horse-racing coverage, news, and analysis through its website and TV channel. To manage sudden surges in demand online during key events in the horse-racing calendar, the firm needed a cost-effective, cloud-based environment that would scale up and down easily and reliably. At The Races chose Windows Azure, and since 2011 has experienced 50 per cent growth in users on its website.

Online identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) provider miiCard (My Internet Identity Card) wanted a secure platform to allow customers to prove their identity online in just a few minutes. It is using Windows Azure to power its service, increase competitiveness, and offer a global service to an industry that demands resilience and scalability. Customers in nine countries already use miiCard, which can support 100,000, or 10 million users as required.

Kaggle is a company and platform launched to provide a link between organizations needing specialized analytic and scientific skills with a global pool of researchers and scientists who can provide those skills. The Kaggle offering caught on so fast that it quickly grew beyond the capabilities of its original online platform, which could not provide the scalability or flexibility that Kaggle needed to grow and support market demand. So the company turned to Windows Azure and Microsoft development tools to relaunch the site. With Windows Azure, Kaggle has a highly scalable platform capable of supporting quick spikes in new users and data traffic, along with a development environment that supports continuous innovation.

Perception Group started as a member of the Microsoft® BizSpark® program, which provides IT startups with resources to help get their business off the ground; they are now a Microsoft Gold and Silver Competency partner delivering IT services to many clients across Argentina. The company was quick to spot opportunities in cloud services and has expanded its portfolio to include these. They viewed Microsoft as a strategic partner in growing their services and adding clients beyond Argentina. As a Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) member, the company was able to leverage Microsoft Partner Services for pre-sales and advisory support. Backed by the guidance received from Partner Services, they were able to generate impactful pre-sales bids which led to new business, reduced time in investigating new technologies, and delivered high quality and faster advisory support to solve customer issues.

Sports New Media specialises in offering integrated social media management services to high-profile sports stars and organisations. It wanted to launch a cloud-based social media management tool to minimise upfront investment and rapidly gain market share. For its award-winning Syocial media management system, Sports New Media chose Windows Azure, making its service accessible around the clock through the web to more than 70 million fans.

United Mobile Apps wanted to deliver Kepplr on a cloud platform that supported interoperability with open-source technologies. By using Windows Azure to host its solution, the company enjoys a platform that interoperates several open- source components. It now offers customers high availability, instant scalability, and reduced costs, all of which are key for a start-up company. It also simplifies IT maintenance while focusing on software, not servers.

To market its solution to independent and enterprise developers, Codealike searched for a cloud platform that supported interoperability with open source technologies. It used Windows Azure to create a productivity service for developers that extends Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and incorporates several open source components. After rapidly developing multiple versions of Codealike, the company gained 350 subscribers in two months.

LiquidSpace ran a proof of concept on Amazon—from which it learned that going into production on that platform would require an unaffordable full-time IT manager. So, the startup turned to Windows Azure for cloud computing, a fully managed platform as a service. LiquidSpace saves time and money, which it reinvests in product development—an investment that’s turbocharging its growth.