Acumatica is a software company that develops enterprise resource planning and business accounting software. Acumatica developed its Web-based software using the Microsoft® .NET Framework and offered on-premises software that required customers to invest in application and database servers. The company wanted to deliver a software-plus-services solution to its customers, effectively hosting and managing its solutions on the Internet through data centers. Acumatica chose to develop its software-plus-services application using Windows Azure™ and Microsoft SQL Azure™. As a result, Acumatica developed its hosted offering in five weeks, reduced capital expenditures, reduced the deployment time for customers while improving their ability to quickly scale up and down, and improved its time-to-market for new services.

Lokad is a software development company that delivers sales, demand, and call volume forecasts for more than 300 customers—from one-person eCommerce companies to multinational retailers. To improve its forecasting capabilities, the company developed advanced forecasting tools and models. However, the more powerful forecasting models required significantly more computing resources than the company had available. Lokad decided to implement its software-plus-services forecasting application on the Windows Azure™ platform—a quick, efficient process. As a result, Lokad reduced IT maintenance costs compared to traditional approaches, delivered more powerful and accurate forecasts to its customers, and improved its ability to expand into new markets.

Kelley Blue Book is a premier provider of vehicle pricing information to consumers, automotive dealers, governments, and the finance and insurance industries. The company developed its information-rich, high-traffic Web site using the Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 and supports it with two hosted data centers. In an effort to reduce hosting costs and ease management of its infrastructure, Kelley Blue Book decided to implement the Windows Azure™ platform—which proved to be a straightforward process. As a result, Kelley Blue Book is able to reduce capital expenditures for new hardware, increase its competitive advantage by focusing on delivering new features, save U.S.$100,000 annually in hosting costs, and use IT resources more strategically.

Sopima, creator of an online solution for managing business contract life cycles, needed to minimize its capital investment to deliver a viable offering. It also wanted to offer an affordable monthly subscription service to gain new customers quickly. Using the Windows Azure™ platform, the company hosts its application in Microsoft® data centers, providing customers with fast response times and high scalability. With the solution, Sopima has limited its investment in infrastructure and can focus on development rather than hardware administration. Sopima estimates that, without the Windows Azure platform, it would have had to hire additional full-time staff members at an annual cost of approximately U.S.$500,000. Its status as a Microsoft Partner will lend Sopima credibility in a competitive marketplace.

Tradeslot specializes in designing and building large scale business-to-business and government-to-business (G2B) auctions platforms; its partner company, Adslot, uses the same auction platform to auction online advertising space. The companies use computation-heavy combinatorial auction algorithms to manage their complex conditional bid processes. However, with a lack of compute power with its existing infrastructure, the companies found it necessary to manually add constraints to auctions. Tradeslot and Adslot implemented Windows Azure™ and, as a result, reduced capital costs for customers—from U.S.$60,000 to only $1,000 for each customer, improved their ability to scale up and improve services for customers, saved critical IT resources, and delivered a solution their customers can trust.

Two decades ago Quark changed the course of traditional publishing with its QuarkXPress® desktop publishing software. Today the company provides publishing solutions to customers around the world across multiple channels. To reach more customers in the huge but fragmented small-to-midsize business market Quark wanted to offer a service combining the flexibility of Web-based computing and the richness of PC-based software. It used the Windows® Azure™ platform and Microsoft® development tools to create Quark Promote, a service through which customers use professionally designed templates to create customized marketing materials that can be picked up at a neighborhood printer or received by mail. The service lets Quark tap into the Web-to-print market, helps business partners increase revenues, and provides customers with an easy, affordable way to create high-quality marketing materials.

Research Director, Inc. (RDI), one of the largest radio-research consulting firms in the United States, produces large, complex presentations that provide radio-audience data for its customers once every quarter. Faced with demands to respond to more data and drastically increase its presentation output to almost four times as many presentations and more than three times as often, the company needed to update its processes to significantly reduce the amount of time required to produce each presentation. RDI engaged Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner PSC Group, LLC to develop a new system for compiling and producing the data presentations using Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007 and Open XML Formats. With its new document generation solution, RDI can produce more presentations in less time, while reducing costs and offering more services to more customers.

Precision.BI needed powerful analysis and reporting components for its healthcare business intelligence solution. The company found what it needed in third-party components from GrapeCity, including functionality that enables users to explore huge quantities of data and to generate rich reports on an ad hoc basis. Precision.BI plans to continue taking advantage of GrapeCity’s rich components and excellent support as both companies migrate their software to Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3.

With an important trade show only two months away, automated microanalysis solution provider ASPEX Corporation had only a short time to add rich reporting and graphing functionality to its Perception MQA (Metal Quality Analyzer) software. The company used ComponentOne Studio for WinForms 2008—a suite of more than 60 .NET Framework components—to quickly and easily add the desired functionality in only six weeks, meeting its deadline and saving roughly 75 percent in software development costs.

When a customer likes your solution but wants you to store 30 terabytes of data to seal the deal, it is time to look for seamless scalability solutions. That was the thinking of Volantis, a developer of innovative solutions for mobile carriers. The company’s Ubik.com software makes it simple for users to point and click to create custom Web sites that are optimized for mobile devices. Not wanting to go into the content hosting business, Volantis worked with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Infosys Technologies Limited to integrate its solution with Microsoft Azure Services to take advantage of Internet-based “cloud” storage for customer Web content. The company estimates that by integrating its solution with Azure, a large telecom company could save U.S. $30 million in rolling out a new service for users by not having to purchase, deploy, and manage a new storage infrastructure.