Partner Solution Case Study
/ Contract Management Specialists Use Cloud to Simplify Development, Enhance Features
Overview
Country or Region:Finland
Industry:Professional services—IT services
Partner Profile
Microsoft Partner Sopima specializes in business contract life-cycle management software. The 15-employee company was founded in early 2009 and is located in Helsinki.
Business Situation
Sopima wanted to create a cloud-based contract management application that would provide customers with improved contract life-cycle management and security with minimal upfront hardware investment.
Solution
Sopima built Sopima Online Contracts on the Windows Azure platform, and developers found that it was easy to make the transition from traditional programming to a cloud-based model.
Benefits
- Simplified scaling, testing, and deployment
- High security with minimal effort
- Familiar development tools
Antti Makkonen, Vice President of Research and Development, Sopima
Managing business contracts and commitments can be a very complex process. Helsinki, Finland-based Sopima saw an opportunity to help businesses streamline their contract life-cycle management while also increasing data security and eliminating the need to invest in data-center hardware. Microsoft Partner Sopima built Sopima Online Contracts on the Windows Azure platform, which is hosted in Microsoft data centers. Working with the Windows Azure platform simplified many aspects of application development and enabled Sopima to offer customers an Internet-wide application they can deploy with minimal time and effort. The transition to a cloud programming model went smoothly for Sopima developers, who were able to spend less time on issues of security, scalability, and compatibility and more time focusing on application features and functionality.
Situation
Microsoft Partner Sopima, based in Helsinki, Finland, is an expert in business contract management. The company was founded with the goal of bringing to companies of all sizes a new and more efficient way of managing the contract life cycle. Sopima has fifteen employees who work to help clients in a variety of industries grow and gain a competitive advantage by optimizing contract negotiations and approvals.
Managing contract lifecycles can be a very complicated process, requiring the input of numerous stakeholders within a company and its business partners. Ensuring that all requirements have been satisfied typically involves sending documents back and forth many times, often through email systems that may not be particularly secure.
Sopima saw an opportunity to simplify and improve contract management by changing it from a mostly email-based process to one that takes advantage of Internet-based cloud technology to streamline workflows, increase security, and reduce costs.
Solution
After investigating the Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine cloud platforms and determining that they lacked sufficient service and management features, Sopima chose to become an early adopter of the Windows Azure platform from Microsoft, which it used as the basis of its new Sopima Online Contracts application.
The programmers at Sopima had extensive experience developing applications with the Microsoft Visual Studio development system and the Microsoft .NET Framework. They discovered that the skills and techniques they already knew made Windows Azure programming easy to pick up, and they appreciated the chance to learn about cloud development.
“Trying something new and different that they know will be huge in the future really got our developers excited,” says Antti Makkonen, Vice President of Research and Development at Sopima. “And because they could work in the familiar Visual Studio environment, they didn’t have to learn new languages and libraries. It’s not exactly the same as single-server programming—cloud services need to be stateless, for example—but they didn’t need any formal training.”
The Sopima team began development by creating a robust and flexible data model that could adapt to the needs of each customer and the wide variety of possible contracts. They then combined Microsoft SQL Azure storage options with an interface built on the Microsoft Silverlight browser plug-in to collect and store contract content and metadata.
“Contract metadata can be quite complex, and we don’t know beforehand what kind of information our customers want linked to the contract,” says Makkonen. “The Silverlight interface guides customers through the process of creating a questionnaire that will collect appropriate metadata for their contracts. The metadata is stored in a SQL Azure database, and other contract assets are stored in encrypted form in Windows Azure Blob Storage.”
Because contracts contain sensitive corporate information, security is an important element of Sopima Online Contracts. Sopima found that using a cloud platform from Microsoft—a company with extensive security expertise—made it much easier to develop a highly secure system. “Because Windows Azure is hosted in Microsoft data centers, we can focus solely on making our application as secure as possible and not worry about the data center side,” says Makkonen. “A huge range of security questions just disappeared when we decided to use Windows Azure.”
Sopima it is expecting rapid growth in the customer base for Sopima Online Contracts,so scalability is important to the company. Deploying Sopima Online Contracts through a cloud platform has all but eliminated that concern, because CPU, storage, and network resources can be added or removed as needed on a pay-as-you-go basis with no upfront capital investment. Developers are also freed from having to worry about many issues of scalability and storage management, since they are handled automatically by Microsoft.
Cloud development has greatly simplified testing and deployment for Sopima. Because services are hosted in the cloud, rather than installed in a customer’s data center, developers don’t need to take into account the huge variety of possible infrastructure configurations. “Basically, we’re developing and testing for a common environment for all customers,” says Makkonen. “The only thing our customers need to install is the Silverlight front end, so we can set up a worldwide deployment in a half hour. It’s really pretty amazing!”
In addition to using resources from Microsoft Finland and the online Microsoft Development Network, Sopima has found that other Windows Azure developers are a valuable source of information. “Bing has really been our friend,” says Makkonen. “You can just type in a question and get answers from people who’ve solved the same or similar challenges. The number of Windows Azure developers posting information on the web is growing fast.”
Sopima worked closely with a group of legal specialists, and it took only three months to get an early version of the application running in the cloud. The first production release was completed in a year, and pilot customers have been impressed with the application. “We realized the benefits of Sopima Online Contracts right away,” says one Sopima customer. “The application looks good and it works well. From the very beginning its functionality met our needs, and it fulfills our various contract management requirements.”
Benefits
By moving to a cloud platform for SopimaOnline Contracts, Sopima programmers were able to focus more on business logic programming and less on issues of scalability, testing, deployment, and security. Because they were able to use a familiar programming environment when working with Windows Azure, they were able to make the move to a new development paradigm without extensive training or the need to learn new tools.
Simplified Scaling, Testing, and Deployment
Sopima programmers were able to concentrate on application logic and performance without worrying about issues of scalability, because application storage and CPU resources on the Windows Azure platform can be easily increased or decreased without upfront planning. Testing and deployment are also much simpler, because programmers don’t need to account for customer infrastructure specifications. “Since all customers are essentially using a common environment, we know that if the program works in our test environment, it will also work in 100 percent of production sites,” says Makkonen.
High Security with Minimal Effort
Security is an important and challenging aspect of developing applications that work with sensitive corporate documents. Because data center security for Windows Azure is managed by Microsoft, Sopima was able to focus on application security and not worry about the back end. The strong end-to-end security of the system has also improved document security for users. “Many of our customers were sending contracts back and forth in email, which is usually unencrypted,” notes Makkonen. “So, if they use Sopima Online Contracts, they are significantly increasing the security of their documents and negotiations.”
Familiar Development Tools
Sopima developers didn’t need to learn new languages and programming environments to make the move to the cloud, because they could continue working in Visual Studio and using the .NET libraries with which they had extensive experience. “The benefits are huge, because you don’t have to start from scratch,” says Makkonen. “Windows Azure has many features that let developers focus on the business logic and forget everything else, so you can devote your time to the areas that make your application special.”
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. It provides developers with on-demand compute, storage, and bandwidth, and a content distribution network to host, scale, and manage web applications 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 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.
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