Symon Communications, a company that develops digital signage solutions for Fortune 1000 markets, wanted to restructure its innovative mobile application for greater scalability and flexibility. The company attended an Architecture Design Session and a Proof-of-Concept workshop at a Microsoft Technology Center (MTC). There, it learned more about the Windows Azure platform and transferred its mobile application to the cloud in a test environment. Pleased with what it saw at the MTC, Symon continued its development on Windows Azure and, as of June 2010, is fine-tuning its mobile application and conducting final testing. The company experienced an accelerated project timeline and a 50-percent reduction in development costs because of its time at the MTC, and Symon is looking forward to the dynamic scalability and cost-efficiency of Windows Azure as it brings new products to market.

Situation
Symon Communications provides rich media signage displayed on flat screen monitors for customers at their locations, events, and trade shows. The content being communicated can be in many formats, including videos, graphics, photographs, text, and real-time information. It can be delivered through an array of visual solution end points, including digital signage, light emitting diode (LED) wallboards, information kiosks, video walls, three-dimensional displays, and mobile devices.

Providing Creative Content
Because each solution delivers content based on geographical location and context, Symon configures the geographical context for every customer. Symon also works with each customer to design creative content that keeps the needs of the customer’s end users in mind.

For example, a large casino wants to communicate its offerings and amenities to guests to help them understand and purchase those offerings. The casino could take advantage of InView Mobile, the Symon smartphone–based player, to effectively convey that information.

Casino guests can download InView Mobile onto their personal mobile devices and launch the app to receive the casino’s custom content, such as information about its restaurants, shows, in-room services, and so on.

The content also can include an offer section that changes based on the guest’s location. While in the casino, guests may see a notice that a slot machine’s current jackpot is more than U.S.$17 million, a ticket special for tonight’s lounge act, and any other information that is relevant to guests when they are on casino property. Once they depart, the offer section shows them something that they could come back for, such as special hotel rates for an upcoming weekend.

Acting on Strategic Insight
Symon had expanded its product line to include mobile media because company leaders noted a trend toward communication through emerging platforms, particularly smartphones. InView Mobile is used at trade shows, sports arenas, and other large-scale venues and events that can cause usage spikes. “As smartphones increase in popularity, we want to provide platforms and solutions that enable our customers to more effectively communicate with their target audiences,” says Keith Roller, Senior Vice President of Product Development & Professional Services at Symon Communications. “We need flexibility to stay on top of trends and offer our customers what they and their customers are looking for.”

InView Mobile generated significant interest from Symon customers, but it was hosted on a single server computer. Because of the heavy yet sporadic nature of the application’s use, Symon saw that it would need a far more scalable hosting model. “A customer might have tens of thousands of people using the application for just a short period of time—for example, for a four-hour football game or a four-day conference,” explains Roller. “Although we knew that the single-hosted-server design would not be our long-term solution, we did not know what the next step should be.”

Solution
Symon determined that rewriting its mobile application for use in cloud computing could meet its scalability needs. “We needed an infrastructure that would make it possible for us to scale without having to pay the hosting costs for maintaining a peak-capacity environment at all times,” says Roller. “Cloud-computing platforms were an obvious solution, but we didn’t know enough about the effort that would be required and what actions we needed to take to successfully make the switch.”

The scalability, flexibility, and lack of up-front costs available with Windows Azure free us to explore new ideas and help us offer affordable solutions to our customers faster. Keith Roller SVP of Product Development & Professional Services, Symon Communications

The company considered cloud computing offerings from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Symon also explored the possibility of continuing its traditional hosting model using a co-location facility but rejected that scenario because it involved increased management and potential trouble with handling the anticipated usage spikes.

Having developed the company’s back-end infrastructure on Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1, Symon focused its attention on using the Windows Azure cloud computing platform, an Internet-scale, cloud platform–as-a-service offering hosted in Microsoft data centers. “We thought that Windows Azure would make sense for us because of our experience with the Windows platform,” says Roller. “But we wanted more information about it and about how things would work if we ported our application to it.”

Getting Help from Experts
To learn more about transferring its existing mobile application to Windows Azure, Symon attended an Architecture Design Session (ADS) at the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Dallas, Texas, in December 2009. The company had been to the MTC facility for various training sessions and special meetings, but had never participated in a customized engagement there before. “We were excited at the unique prospect of working on a new platform in a focused setting, guided by architects with considerable expertise,” says Roller.

During the two-day ADS, five Symon attendees and an MTC architect talked through the company’s existing solutions to determine requirements for the move to Windows Azure. They identified both the technical and the commercial impacts of porting their solutions—including the mobile application—to the cloud. “The ADS discussion got us thinking about the best way to restructure our infrastructure so that we could make the most of Windows Azure,” says Todd Sutherland, Director of Development Operations at Symon Communications.

In March 2010, Symon returned to the MTC for a two-week Proof-of-Concept workshop to develop a pilot solution: a Windows Azure–based mobile application for use on multiple smartphones. By the third day, the group had a working mobile application up and running in the cloud. “We were definitely surprised at how quickly we completed the pilot solution, and we were happy to have time to do such thorough testing. For instance, we got to use the Microsoft Device Emulator for Windows Mobile to see how the application would work on Windows Phone 7,” says Roller. Windows Phone 7 is an upcoming release and successor of Windows Mobile 6.5.

Adds Sutherland, “We knew a lot going into the Proof-of-Concept workshop because we’d gone through the ADS, but none of us thought it would be that quick and easy to make the switch to Windows Azure. We certainly didn’t think that we’d have time to start testing the application on Windows phones as well.”

Transferring to Cloud Computing Components
At the MTC, the group discovered the best way to map the company’s mobile application to specific Windows Azure components. The company’s existing application included stored content in the form of images, video, and so on; a web server to serve that content to end users; and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software to keep track of users based on their global positioning system (GPS) location. For the cloud computing scenario, Symon replaced the content storage with Windows Azure Blob Storage, the web server with the Windows Azure operating system, and SQL Server 2008 with Microsoft SQL Azure.

With the help of MTC architects, Symon made it possible for its business customers to dynamically upload their content changes to Windows Azure Blob Storage, making it easy for them to update the information that they offer to their customers. The company uses web roles to cache the data. “We’ll also use at least one worker role to pull information and store it in a SQL Azure–based database for our data-collection and content services solutions,” notes Sutherland.

During the workshop, Symon solved how to make its overall architecture more modular. “We worked with the MTC architects to determine how our software could work both on-premises and in the cloud to satisfy the varying needs of our customers, some of whom may even want a combination of the two,” says Roller. “Our developers and the MTC architects spent the second week of the workshop discussing our database design and how to make our back end and our applications multitenant-aware so that we can make optimum use of Windows Azure. We even had time to do some development toward that end.”

Putting a Solution into Production
Following the workshop, Symon continued its work with Windows Azure and plans to use the same Windows Azure mobile infrastructure to support multiple hardware devices, including, but not limited to, Windows Phone 7, Apple iPhones, Google Android devices, and others. The company believes that extending its application to run on mobile phones will help it expand its market presence, especially when it comes to midsize and small businesses. “We’ll be able to remove the barrier to entry and widen our customer base because Windows Azure eliminates the need for customers to deal with managing and maintaining servers—they can just deploy the media players and go,” says Roller.

The company expects that the cloud computing option will appeal to customers using its traditional solution end points as well as mobile devices. Symon has heard from customers that want the company’s standard digital signage and kiosk solutions—which run the Symon media player—but that do not want to host and manage servers. “At the MTC, we worked to bring together the infrastructure for our existing non-mobile and mobile applications so that everything can be fully integrated with our standard digital signage,” says Roller.

As of June 2010, Symon is in the final testing and fine-tuning stages and expects its Windows Azure solution to be in production for customers by the end of August 2010.

Benefits
Symon now has the experience that it needs to make optimal use of Windows Azure to expand its product line and enjoy greater business success. “With Windows Azure, both our company and our customers get all the necessary capacity, without the need to deploy and manage servers,” says Roller. “The scalability, flexibility, and lack of up-front costs available with Windows Azure free us to explore new ideas and help us offer affordable solutions to our customers faster,” says Roller.

It’s becoming increasingly important to take advantage of the development speed that Windows Azure offers so that we can be first to market with the kinds of features and functionality our customers are beginning to want. Keith Roller SVP of Product Development & Professional Services, Symon Communications

The company credits MTC architects with helping Symon gain the knowledge it needed to bring its mobile application to market quickly. “To me, the value that the MTC brings cannot be overstated,” says Roller. “It’s such an advantage to work with experts who have real-time access to the resources they need to guide us to the ‘done’ state.”

Reduced Project Risks
Symon has found that its time at the MTC helped mitigate the risks associated with moving to a new platform. “Because the MTC experience gave us such a thorough understanding of what we were doing, we could eliminate all the time we otherwise would have spent trying figure everything out on our own,” says Roller. “We got immediate confirmation that everything worked, so there was no need to develop a Plan B, C, or D.”

“Even when we asked a question that our main MTC resource couldn’t answer, he went straight out and quickly found others who could give us the information we needed,” says Sutherland. “The MTC experts kept us from straying, confirmed that we were on the right path, and explained why.”

That reduced risk also extends to the company’s ongoing work with the Windows Azure platform. Symon enjoys the ability to freely experiment with new concepts without setting up or maintaining the test infrastructure necessary to do so. “With Windows Azure, we have no setup costs and only low costs for test instances because the utilization is so low in an evaluation scenario,” says Roller. “We can take more risks because the cost penalty is so diminished.”

Fast Time-to-Market
Symon experienced a reduced project timeline because of the work that it did at the MTC. “By taking advantage of the MTC, we cut a significant percentage of the possible overall project timeline. It took us three business days working at the MTC to produce what would have taken us a month to do on our own,” states Roller. “Plus, we saved more than 50 percent on project development costs, which equates to approximately $25,000.”

The company found that investing time in a dedicated environment made a difference when it came to the ability to focus on technology. “We got a tremendous productivity boost from getting everyone away from the office and into a great facility that had the people and resources to immediately answer our questions and solve our problems. The expedited knowledge transfer at the MTC was remarkable. I even bumped into experts in the hallway who stopped and instantly responded to my ancillary questions,” says Roller.

Symon now has greater confidence in its ability to develop on the Windows Azure platform, which has its own time-to-market benefits. “It’s becoming increasingly important to take advantage of the development speed that Windows Azure offers so that we can be first to market with the kinds of features and functionality our customers are beginning to want,” says Roller.

Decreased Management Burden
The company expects other business benefits from its move to Windows Azure. For instance, Symon can conserve costs with Windows Azure due to the decreased administration necessary for its infrastructure. “Now that our IT staff resources will no longer have to manage the server infrastructure, we’ll be able to reallocate them to work on more useful tasks, including development and other value-added IT projects,” says Roller.

“With Windows Azure,” he continues, “we get to cover all the spikes and pay only for what we use—all while requiring no IT maintenance from Symon.”

Dynamic Scalability for Lower Costs
With the inclusion of Windows Azure, Symon is providing a new, more cost-effective way for its customers to handle the vagaries in application usage. The company’s traditional hosting infrastructure supported the intermittent spikes, but Symon and its customers paid for that peak capacity all month long, even while it was not in use.

“By using Windows Azure and putting processing as close as possible to our customers’ locations, we can spin up instances on an as-needed basis and avoid incurring costs both for Symon and for our customers,” says Roller.

Symon believes that its use of Windows Azure supports the company’s goal of increasing the number and range of solutions that it will be able to offer customers. “The more we learn about Windows Azure, the more we realize how flexible it will make us; it has opened our eyes to all sorts of potential solutions,” says Roller. “With the Windows Azure platform, we can concentrate on business applications, knowing that the worldwide, scalable infrastructure to support them is being taken care of.”

Microsoft Technology Centers
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For more information about Symon Communications products and services, call (800) 827-9666 or visit the Web site at:
www.symon.com