Zitec develops custom software and is known for its expertise with PHP development. The company developed a social-networking application for hotel reviews, but wanted to add hotel-price trends as a differentiating feature among competing products. Zitec wanted to develop the capability in PHP and wanted a relational database in the cloud to manage the raw statistical data it would use for trend predictions. After ruling out Amazon Relational Database Service, the company used the Windows Azure Software Development Kit for PHP and deployed Microsoft SQL Azure as the database. It now has a growing database that quickly scales up without sacrificing performance—and that costs up to 90 percent less than other providers. Thanks to the interoperable architecture of the Windows Azure platform, Zitec quickly brought its application to market and has opened new revenue streams.

Situation
Headquartered in Bucharest, Romania, Zitec is an IT consultancy that specializes in developing custom software solutions for customers worldwide. Since its founding in 2003, Zitec has grown from three employees with a passion for developing online applications, to 45 employees and an expanded portfolio of IT consulting services. The company strives to work with a wide range of technologies to meet customers’ needs and has renowned expertise in the LAMP technology stack: Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and PHP, Perl and Python.

The company started expanding its portfolio and developing its own software applications, including a content management system and an e-commerce platform. Zitec also wanted to combine its development expertise with its knowledge of the travel industry, which it had gained after providing IT services for several companies in the hospitality and tourism industry, and develop a social-networking application for hotel reviews and recommendations.

In January 2010, Zitec started development on HotelPeeps, a Facebook application built on the PHP programming language and MySQL relational database. The social application, which launched in March 2010, provides hotel recommendations and reviews from friends. “Instead of relying on other travel review sites where you may not know the reviewer, with HotelPeeps, the reviews and recommendations are coming from people whom you already know and trust,” explains Alexandru Lapusan, Chief Executive Officer at Zitec.

HotelPeeps was one of the first applications of its kind on the market and was met with initial success. However, just a few months after Zitec debuted HotelPeeps, another company released a similar application that validated HotelPeeps’s success. However, Zitec realized that it needed a competitive differentiator for its social networking–based hotel review application—something it could offer that no other company already had on the market.

For our needs, SQL Azure is approximately 50 to 90 percent cheaper than Amazon when it comes to storage costs alone. If you need cost-effective scalability, SQL Azure is the best option. Alexandru Lapusan Chief Executive Officer, Zitec

Zitec wanted to add the ability to calculate, aggregate, and display hotel-price trends for popular travel destinations based on real booking data. To build such a service, Zitec would have to collect raw price-offer data from international booking engines, ticketing offices, and other tourism systems, representing offers from approximately 110,000 hotels worldwide. Then, it would have to calculate the data and present it in an easy-to-understand format that people could use to see pricing trends in any city and make travel arrangements according to their economic preferences.

To offer pricing-trend capabilities on HotelPeeps, Zitec developers knew that they needed to build a scalable, transaction-based service that used a large relational database and supported SQL syntax, which would compute the data it wanted to use from multiple sources to create accurate pricing trends. For the relational database, the company considered building its own server infrastructure but quickly ruled out the option. Zitec knew that it would take too long to build, and the company wanted to go to market as soon as possible with a service that would differentiate it from competitors. In addition, the developers at Zitec planned to develop the application by using the same language that it used to develop the HotelPeeps application: PHP. Therefore, it needed a cloud services platform that would interoperate with its chosen development language.

The company also considered using a MySQL database hosted on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), technologies that the company was already familiar with. However, with MySQL, Zitec would not have the SQL syntax support it needed to process part of the data.

Solution
To address its need for a cost-effective, scalable relational database that could manage transactional data for HotelPeeps, and after ruling out Amazon Web Services as a cloud services provider, Zitec chose Microsoft SQL Azure, which is part of the Windows Azure platform. The Windows Azure platform includes the Windows Azure cloud services operating system, its development, service hosting, and service management environment. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage and a content distribution network to host, scale, and manage web applications through Microsoft data centers. It also includes SQL Azure, a cloud-based relational database service that is based on Microsoft SQL Server technologies and hosted at Microsoft data centers.

Scalable, Interoperable Architecture
Developers at Zitec used PHP to develop HotelPeeps Trends, a feature of the HotelPeeps social-networking application that uses real price-offer, giving travelers the ability to choose hotel accommodations based on their desired budget. The company used the Windows Azure Software Development Kit (SDK) for PHP to build HotelPeeps Trends on the Windows Azure platform and required less than one week of effort to get up to speed with the platform framework. “Some people think that a PHP application running on Microsoft infrastructure is science fiction, but that’s not the case. PHP and the Windows Azure platform work together beautifully,” says Lucian Daia, PHP Developer at Zitec. “More PHP developers should take a serious look at Windows Azure and its impressive interoperability.”

HotelPeeps Trends communicates with a gateway server running on Linux, which, in turn, connects through web services to seven third-party booking engines that return hotel offers. The raw pricing data, which includes more than 1.5 million offers for 25 cities, is normalized by a PHP command-line process and stored in SQL Azure. A task scheduler also executes another PHP command-line process to scan the data for a particular city and adds that task to queue storage in Windows Azure.

The HotelPeeps Trends service is hosted on several instances of Windows Azure virtual machine roles running Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.5 on the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. The virtual server also includes a PHP runtime running in command-line mode that pulls pricing data from SQL Azure, caches it, and then displays it for the user as a chart, which can be filtered by accommodation type (Figure 1). Zitec also uses Table storage in Windows Azure to store system diagnostic information in a central location.

Figure 1. HotelPeeps Trends uses SQL Azure to transform raw data from multiple sources into hotel-pricing trends that travelers can use for scheduling travel to popular destinations.

Ongoing Development Efforts
By March 2011, HotelPeeps Trends offered hotel-price trends for 30 popular travel destinations, primarily in Europe, and it adds new cities regularly. Users can also set up price alerts to be notified of hotel deals.

Zitec also continues to develop new features for HotelPeeps and new features for HotelPeeps Trends, such as the ability to book a hotel room directly from the HotelPeeps application. In the future, Zitec plans to make HotelPeeps a stand-alone web application. It will still use PHP for the development language and is considering hosting the entire application in Windows Azure as it gains popularity.

We consistently have top performance with SQL Azure. Lucian Daia PHP Developer, Zitec

“We’re so happy with SQL Azure database and Windows Azure compute and storage for the HotelPeeps Trends component that, if the need arises to put the entire application in the cloud, we will certainly turn to Windows Azure based on its scalability and interoperability with PHP,” says Lapusan.

Benefits
As a result of using SQL Azure, Zitec achieved critical levels of scalability and maintained high levels of application performance—all while saving up to 90 percent compared to other relational database services. In addition, the PHP developers at Zitec quickly developed HotelPeeps Trends and brought the service to market quickly, thanks to the interoperable and open architecture, and the service management environment that the Windows Azure platform provides. Zitec also discovered new revenue opportunities with HotelPeeps.

Achieved Critical Levels of Scalability
Zitec processes 2 million offers each month for HotelPeeps Trends and also stores previous offers in order to compute real-time data and transform it into accurate trend information. Each week, the company adds large volumes of data to its database, and it is able to quickly scale up without any lag in performance. “We consistently have top performance with SQL Azure,” says Daia. “We deal with large volumes of data and the database is constantly growing—and performance remains top notch without any issues. Scalability is what we needed for this kind of data-intensive application, and SQL Azure exceeded our expectations.”

Saved up to 90 Percent on Relational Database Costs
As a result of using SQL Azure, Zitec has a cost-effective relational database—and one that meets its needs for SQL syntax support. By using SQL Azure, Zitec will pay U.S.$10 each month for a 1-gigabyte instance of SQL Azure. The closest option that Amazon RDS offers with a MySQL database is approximately $100 each month. “For our needs, SQL Azure is 50 to 90 percent cheaper than Amazon when it comes to storage costs alone,” says Lapusan. “If you need cost-effective scalability, SQL Azure is the best option.”

Fast Time-to-Market
Though the company continues to develop new features for HotelPeeps Trends, Zitec developed the first release of the application in less than two months—helping meet its goal to bring a competitive differentiator to market quickly. Several factors contributed to the company’s ability to quickly release HotelPeeps Trends. First, the PHP developers at the company, who were previously less familiar with developing for Microsoft products, used the Windows Azure SDK for PHP to get up to speed quickly and only required one week’s worth of effort to ramp up on the new technology. In addition, the interoperability of the Windows Azure platform, and that it uses open Internet protocols, ensured that the developers experienced a smooth development process. “Developing for the Windows Azure platform with PHP was straightforward and trouble free,” says Daia.

Zitec did not stop at only using the existing Windows Azure SDK for PHP but already contributed an additional component. “We won’t stop at this one, we’re already considering more code contributions,” says Lapusan.

In addition, Zitec did not have to worry about managing and maintaining its cloud-based infrastructure, compared to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. “Many companies think that by deploying a virtual machine with other cloud services providers they’ll reap the benefits of cloud computing,” explains Lapusan. “But without proper maintenance and management of those virtual machines, which most startup companies want to avoid anyway, they’re not getting the full benefits of the cloud. Lapusan adds, “One of the reasons that SQL Azure is perfect for startup companies, or those who don’t want to spend time on administration tasks, is that there is no maintenance. It’s one of the reasons we’ll be recommending the Windows Azure platform to our customers.”

Discovered New Revenue Opportunities
As HotelPeeps gains popularity, Zitec plans to develop new capabilities that will help it not only attract more users, but also capitalize on revenue opportunities. The company’s goal is to extend the service, which is designed as a free service for individual travelers, as a service to travel agents to help them find the best deals for their customers. In addition, Zitec is ensuring that individual travelers can book hotel stays directly through the HotelPeeps site. In both scenarios, Zitec will receive a commission, either from the travel agent or the hotel. “As we develop new features and take advantage of SQL Azure, we are discovering possible new revenue streams,” says Lapusan. “And we’re not stopping here—we plan to continue our development efforts with HotelPeeps Trends and use the Windows Azure platform to find other opportunities.”

Windows Azure Platform
The Windows Azure platform provides an excellent foundation for expanding online product and service offerings. The main components include:

• Microsoft SQL Azure. Microsoft SQL Azure offers the first cloud-based relational and self-managed database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies.
• 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.
• 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 subscription in the Windows Azure platform.

To learn more, visit:
www.sqlazure.com

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 in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. 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 Zitec products and services, call +40 (0)72 - 327 61 12 or visit the website at:
www.zitec.com