Swedish IT firm Softronic wanted to address the needs of government agencies by providing solutions that could be created simply, while avoiding steep infrastructure and hardware costs. By using the Windows Azure platform from Microsoft, the firm created two innovative solutions that bypass traditional IT architectures and instead rely on the cloud to deliver efficient, cost-effective services that easily scale to meet demand.
Business Needs
Softronic is a Swedish IT firm that provides a broad range of services for government organizations and private sector businesses. The company, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, offers software engineering, system integration, and project management in areas such as customer relationship management, e-commerce, and business intelligence technology.
One market for Softronic is building solutions that address government mandates and initiatives. For example, over a period of years, the European Union (EU) has launched efforts to control and prevent money-laundering activities. The goal has been to make it difficult for criminal and terrorist organizations to move money across and through national borders and financial institutions. And in Sweden, Softronic has helped the national government find ways to make vast amounts of public data more accessible to spur innovation and new economic activity, instead of keeping information stored in databases that are hard to find or difficult to access.
Mathias Ekman, Manager of Cloud Services for Softronic, says IT companies and departments face significant cost and logistical problems when trying to address these kinds of issues using traditional IT systems that are installed on-premises using client-server architectures. “Typically, these kinds of challenges require deployments of complex and costly systems,” he says. “For money-laundering prevention, organizations would typically deploy large, on-premises systems that are expensive to install and maintain. As for the public data project, agencies might not even try such a thing when faced with the expense and effort needed to deploy a solution using traditional IT components.”
Solution
In response to these challenges, Softronic became an early adopter and advocate of the Windows Azure platform. By using the cloud-services platform and related Windows Azure tools from Microsoft, Softronic designed and deployed two solutions using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
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Windows Azure has become a strategic platform for our development efforts. It fits the needs of more and more of our customers, who are changing their business models to incorporate software as a service |
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Mathias Ekman
Manager of Cloud Services
Softronic |
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The first, called CM1, helps organizations such as banks and insurance companies comply with EU money-laundering regulations with a fast, easy way to check customer accounts against sanction lists that are maintained in the cloud. The solution incorporates business logic and processes that help protect confidential information while making it possible to quickly identify unusual or suspicious financial transactions.
The second solution, deployed under the name Offentligadata, was built on the Windows Azure platform and takes advantage of the Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket, a service that provides a single location where the Swedish government can publish information from a range of internal databases and applications—and thus comply with the European Public Sector Information (PSI) policy. The Offentligadata project had three goals: to simplify the publication and consumption of public data; to make the data easy to access and always available; and to build services and controls around the solution that are easy to reuse for other projects. Softronic met those goals and is working with the Swedish government on ensuring that data released to the cloud is of high enough quality to be useful to consumers or other developers building their own applications based on the information.
“Windows Azure has become a strategic platform for our development efforts,” says Ekman. “It fits the needs of customers who are changing their business models to incorporate software as a service.”
Benefits
Its use of the Windows Azure platform is benefiting both Softronic and its customers. Because Windows Azure provides both the infrastructure and billing services required to support enterprise solutions, it lets Softronic put more resources into innovation. This, in turn, leads to faster development and easier deployments. It also provides an environment for more fluid, continuous development efforts that helps eliminate costly and complex production cycles.
Spurs Innovation
Windows Azure is a boon to developers because it frees them from concerns about costly or complicated IT infrastructures and allows them to focus on development tasks. “With Windows Azure, Microsoft handles the infrastructure and the billing, which helps us keep our focus on creating solutions to meet ongoing business challenges,” Ekman says. “It supports solutions like Offentligadata by eliminating the IT barriers that used to prevent people from even trying projects like this.”
Speeds Development and Deployments
By removing the need to focus on hardware, networks, and other IT infrastructure components, the Windows Azure platform makes it possible for Softronic developers to work faster and more efficiently on concepts. “We don’t have to buy servers or talk to third parties about setting up an infrastructure,” Ekman says. “And Windows Azure makes deployment much simpler. When a solution is ready, we simply push a button and it is published to the cloud. This process is not only much faster than in the past, but it also eliminates all of the human errors that used to be a routine part of deploying enterprise solutions.”
Fosters Continuous Services
Windows Azure helps developers and their customers by fostering a continuous development environment that breaks from the more traditional model of lengthy—and costly—development cycles. “We believe that we’re moving toward a world of continuous services,” Ekman says. “Windows Azure supports our customers’ requests for smaller but more frequent innovations and services. It also benefits us, because we can create basic solutions and then modify them quickly—and scale them up or down easily—using Windows Azure to meet the needs of other customers. It is an incredibly efficient environment for developers.”
To view the full story plus video of Softronic and other success stories, visit the Microsoft Success Web site at: www.microsoft.com/business/success/
Microsoft Cloud Services
Microsoft offers a complete set of cloud-based solutions to meet business needs, including solutions for advertising, communications (email, meetings), collaboration (document storage, sharing, workflow), business applications (customer resource management, business productivity), data storage and management, and infrastructure services. In addition, customers can take advantage of an entire ecosystem of solution providers and Microsoft partners.
For more information, please visit www.microsoft.com/cloud
Windows Azure Platform
The Windows Azure platform provides an excellent foundation for expanding online product and service offerings. The main components include:
Windows Azure. Windows Azure is the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.
Microsoft SQL Azure. Microsoft SQL Azure offers the first cloud-based relational and self-managed database service built on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 technologies.
Windows Azure AppFabric. With Windows Azure AppFabric, developers can build and manage applications more easily both on-premises and in the cloud.
- AppFabric Service Bus connects services and applications across network boundaries to help developers build distributed applications.
- AppFabric Access Control provides federated, claims-based access control for REST web services.
Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket. Developers and information workers can use the new service DataMarket to easily discover, purchase, and manage premium data subscriptions in the Windows Azure platform.
To learn more, visit: www.microsoft.com/windowsazure
Related Resources and Information
To learn more about the Windows Azure platform, visit the website at: www.windowsazure.com
Learn: Channel9 Windows Azure Training Course
Read: Security Best Practices for Developing on the Windows Azure Platform
Download: Windows Azure Training Kit
Download: Windows Azure SDK
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
