Customer Solution Case Study
/ Xerox Cloud Print Solution Connects Mobile Workers to Printers Around the World
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Manufacturing—High tech and electronics
Customer Profile
Xerox provides document technology, services, software, and supplies for graphic communication and office printing. The U.S.$22 billion company has 133,000 employees serving customers in more than 160 countries.
Business Situation
In 2010, Xerox introduced Xerox Mobile Print, which lets workers print from smartphones within their companies. But Xerox wanted to enable “print from anywhere,” even outside company walls.
Solution
Xerox used the Windows Azure platform to create Xerox Cloud Print, a cloud-based printing service that allows mobile workers to print to any available public printer from their mobile devices.
Benefits
- More innovation, higher customer satisfaction
- Faster time-to-market
- Scalable "pay as you go" model
- Reduced risk with trustworthy partner
Eugene Shustef, Chief Engineer, Global Document Outsourcing, Xerox
Xerox is an industry leader in Managed Print Services (MPS) and in 2010 expanded its MPS capabilities by introducing Xerox Mobile Print, a service that lets workers print to any printer in their company from handheld devices like smartphones. In 2010, Xerox began extending this service with Xerox Cloud Print, which enables workers to locate and print to any printer inside or outside their company from smartphones. Xerox built this service on the Windows Azure platform, using Windows Azure as the operating environment and Microsoft SQL Azure as the relational database service. Because it could use its existing IT skills and assets, Xerox was able to get this innovative service to technology readiness in just four months. And, because the Windows Azure platform follows a flexible “pay as you go” model, Xerox can scale the service up or down at a moment’s notice.
Situation
Xerox Corporation is a U.S.$22 billion global enterprise that provides business process and document management products and services. Headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, Xerox provides leading-edge document technology, services, software, and supplies for graphic communication and office printing environments of any size. The 133,000 people of Xerox serve customers in more than 160 countries.
Document processes have been the core of the company’s business for the past decade. Through its Global Document Outsourcing group, Xerox has gone beyond designing and manufacturing printers, copiers, and fax machines to managing these devices and related processes for customers in a new service category called Managed Print Services. “We want to simplify business processes for customers,” says Eugene Shustef, Chief Engineer in the Global Document Outsourcing group at Xerox. “For example, print may not be the best way to get a message out; digital distribution might work better, even though material distributed digitally often ends up being printed. We help customers look broadly at document life cycles and workflows.”
Examining document processes quickly led Xerox to the need for mobile printing. Large customers had tens of thousands of workers “going mobile”—using their smartphones as their primary computing device and working from conference rooms, customer sites, hotels, and cafes far more than from their offices, if they even had one. Printing was the glaring hole in smartphone-based computing. Workers had to wait until they returned to their desktop or laptop computer to print, route documents to a colleague’s computer for printing, or just go without printing.
In late 2009, Xerox got to work on this problem and came up with Xerox Mobile Print, a service that lets workers search for a nearby printer and forward print jobs right from their smartphones, from anywhere inside their office or campus. The service is a private cloud solution that large enterprises set up by using an on-premises infrastructure consisting of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software, the Windows Server 2008 operating system, and Microsoft Office applications.
However, the next logical step was to enable mobile workers to print when traveling outside their business locations. This would require transforming the private-cloud infrastructure required by Xerox Mobile Print to a public-cloud infrastructure. To take Xerox Mobile Print into the public cloud, Xerox needed a multitenant database solution—that is, one that would allow the same application to be shared by multiple customers, or “tenants,” by isolating each tenant’s data. Without multitenancy, a public-cloud printing solution would be cost-prohibitive to deploy. Xerox also needed flexible scalability.
“We knew there was a need for the service, but were not precisely sure of how quick the adoption might be,” Shustef says. “We just knew that we needed to create a multitenant infrastructure that could grow. We didn’t want to invest in a huge physical infrastructure if the idea didn’t take off with customers.”
Solution
Shustef wears another hat at Xerox as a member of the company’s technology adoption and innovation team, which had been working with Microsoft to determine how Xerox might use the Windows Azure platform. This cloud platform provides a range of development, computing, database, storage, and data services that help organizations offload computing tasks to Microsoft data centers and access them over the Internet.
“Xerox was familiar with cloud technologies and had used them to deliver other services,” Shustef says. “The whole idea of Internet-based computing was not new to us. Still, we knew that we needed a trusted partner to help us move to a public cloud model.”
While private cloud services such as Xerox Mobile Print provide flexible computing services in a protected environment behind a customer’s secure firewall, a public cloud service would require extending those services to multiple companies sharing hardware in a public data center. “We felt that Microsoft was leading with cloud technologies and was putting many of its own core business assets on the Windows Azure platform,” Shustef says. “We felt that Microsoft would be a trusted ally, would lower the risk, and would inspire confidence in customers.”
Relational, Scalable Database
Shustef’s team knew that it wanted to use Windows Azure as the compute engine for its public cloud service, which it called internally Xerox Cloud Print, and knew that it wanted to use Microsoft SQL Server 2008 as the application database. It was important that Xerox Cloud Print have relational capabilities, as Xerox Mobile Print did, as well as dynamic database scalability. The team ended up selecting Microsoft SQL Azure, a cloud-based relational database service built on SQL Server technologies and part of the Windows Azure platform.
“We believed that SQL Azure was the platform that would give us the familiarity and scalability that we needed,” Shustef says. “We wanted to reuse as many investments as we could, and not only was SQL Server the database for Xerox Mobile Print, but our development team was solidly Microsoft-trained. We looked at other alternatives, but they were too expensive to rent the needed servers if the service was a success.”
Four-Month Development
The development job was to take the core technology of Xerox Mobile Print and convert it to a public-cloud environment. The requirement for multitenancy changed the database schema somewhat, but was not a major obstacle. “We migrated from SQL Server to SQL Azure within two weeks,” Shustef says. “Microsoft did a great job communicating with us through the SQL Azure Technology Adoption Program, and we were up and running right away. Our developers saw no difference between working with SQL Azure and SQL Server. The only time they even thought about SQL Azure was when we moved local schema changes to the cloud, and automated scripts took care of that.”
Xerox divided up Xerox Cloud Print data storage among several Windows Azure services. In SQL Azure, it stores all relational data—user account information, job information, device information, print job metadata, and other such data. Xerox places multiple tenants in a single SQL Azure database instance, with logical partitions separating data for different customers.
It stores actual encrypted print files in Windows Azure Blob storage, which provides storage for raw collections of binary data. Application logs are stored in Windows Azure Table storage, which provides a low-cost option for structured storage that needs to be queried.
“Cloud printing requires quite a bit of data management,” Shustef says. “There are files coming in, files being converted to print-ready format, and files being distributed to a variety of printers. We needed quite a bit of storage and different types of storage for different tasks. With Windows Azure, we have a range of options for storing nonrelational data, so we don’t clog up our database. Our database stays leaner and is therefore faster, and it’s also more economical, because we don’t need as many SQL Azure instances.”
Xerox had the first version of Xerox Cloud Print finished in just four months (March to July 2010). It has deployed the service internally and to several customers under nondisclosure agreements.
Push-Button Printing from Mobile Devices
With Xerox Cloud Print, mobile workers can print from their mobile devices by routing print jobs through the Windows Azure platform to the nearest available public printer. Say a worker is traveling and receives an email message on her smartphone with an attachment that she needs to print. She clicks the “open with” button on her device, and Xerox Cloud Print appears as an option. Depending on how customers configure the service, the worker might then open a dialog box that enables her to enter an address (such as for a copy shop nearby) or search for the closest public printer. She can then submit the print job from her phone.
Benefits
By using the Windows Azure platform, and SQL Azure in particular, Xerox was able to get to market quickly with Xerox Cloud Print, an innovative printing service for mobile workers. Xerox was able to innovate faster with SQL Azure, reuse existing IT assets, scale the service rapidly, as needed, and eliminate on-premises infrastructure costs.
More Innovation, Higher Customer Satisfaction
Xerox feels fortunate to have demanding customers who insist on continuous innovation. “Demanding customers is a great problem to have,” says Shustef. “We, of course, want to satisfy and delight them with a continuous flow of new products and services. But there’s a cost to innovation. You have to try things that may not pan out, or you may have a great idea that doesn’t scale quickly and cost effectively. We have to be able to try ideas, fail quickly, and be ready for success when it comes. The Windows Azure platform enables us to do that. For a very small investment, we can try a new project and see if it works, close it down tomorrow, or ramp it up immediately. Cloud computing lowers the barrier to innovation.”
Faster Time-to-Market
By deploying Xerox Cloud Print on SQL Azure, Xerox was also able to get the service to market in just four months. To develop the service using an on-premises infrastructure, the development team would have had to requisition development, test, application, and database servers, and then unpack, rack, and test them—a process that could take up to a month for each server. With SQL Azure, Xerox could summon the needed storage resources at the click of a button.
Additionally, the Windows Azure platform gave Xerox developers the same familiar technology that they used for on-premises and private-cloud development. “We see Windows Azure instead of Windows Server and SQL Azure instead of SQL Server,” Shustef says. “This familiarity means faster time-to-market, because we’re able to reuse a lot of the code that we write for the private cloud and move it very simply to the public cloud. That’s a great benefit to our business.”
He adds, “Without Windows Azure, there’s no way we could deploy a global rollout of a new service such as Xerox Cloud Print with technology deployment and presence around the world. It’s virtually impossible to stand up your own public-cloud data center with global locations without a major investment. With Windows Azure, we gained a global presence overnight.”
Scalable “Pay as you Go” Model
The “pay as you go” model provided by SQL Azure was perfect for the first project that Xerox selected to implement in the public cloud. “The payment model of SQL Azure enabled us to lower our capital investment,” Shustef says. “We didn’t need to buy servers to run testing and staging. We put both those environments in the cloud and paid only for what we needed. As customers sign up and we grow the service, we grow our investment. If 5,000 more customers sign up for the service tomorrow, we just click a few buttons and increase the number of SQL Azure instances. If we see that only 1,000 customers stick around, then we can scale back.”
Reduced Risk with a Trustworthy Partner
Xerox feels that partnering with Microsoft sped the journey and lowered the risk of creating its first public-cloud service. “To innovate continuously, we need a partner that allows us to scale our platform and bring new features to market, and Microsoft is that partner,” Shustef says. “Windows Azure is just the latest example of technology that we were able to adopt to create a brand new offering that will enable our business to grow.”
Lining up with Microsoft also builds customer confidence. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty around security in the cloud, and it helps to say that we’re using Microsoft as our cloud provider,” Shustef says in conclusion. “By choosing a partner that is trusted and willing to put its own applications on this platform, we can prove to ourselves and our customers that it’s reliable and trustworthy.”
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. It provides developers with on-demand compute, storage, and bandwidth, and a content distribution network 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 subscriptions in the Windows Azure platform.
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