Customer Solution Case Study
/ IT Firm Uses Cloud to Meet Mobile Data Access Demands for Corporate Customers
Overview
Country or Region: Germany
Industry: Professional services— IT services
Partner Profile
An IT solution provider based in Waiblingen, Germany, runtime software is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that focuses on providing business process solutions for midsize businesses.
Business Situation
The firm wanted to explore new technologies that could help customers with mobile workers access data faster, more affordably, and with more scalability to meet seasonal demand.
Solution
runtime software created an online game that delivers important proof of concepts around scalability, cost, and the integration of social media.
Benefits
· Scalability meets fluctuating demand
· Fast performance, high availability
· Integration with social media
· Powerful business platform for solution providers / “With Windows Azure, we have a product road map that features less heavy-weight offerings in favor of smaller, simpler, easier-to-understand services.”
Markus Eilers, Chief Executive Officer, runtime software
To help corporate customers with large numbers of mobile workers needing quick access to data, runtime software sought technology that could provide a cost-effective, highly scalable way to deliver information while also incorporating features such as social media integration. To test its ideas, the Microsoft Gold Certified Partner used the Windows Azure platform to create Odigene, a social-media action game. The game, which is outside the firm’s normal development work, demonstrates how high-performance, high-availability solutions can be created quickly and cost-efficiently in the cloud to successfully address the competitive needs of businesses such as retailers, manufacturers, and sales and service organizations.
Situation
The German firm runtime software is an IT consulting, system integration, and software development firm that specializes in solutions for retail and supply chain management operations. These include mobile computing solutions for sales and service representatives, systems that support supply chain logistics, and customer relationship management solutions.
Over the past several years, the data access requirements of the firm’s customers have evolved, creating challenges and opportunities for runtime. In particular, customers want mobile employees to have fast access to large stores of complex data. For instance, many of the firm’s key customers, such as clothing manufacturer and retailer Trendmark Fashion, rely on mobile representatives to show and sell their wares using online databases filled with graphically intensive images and inventory statistics.
Markus Eilers, Chief Executive Officer of runtime software, says continual improvements in the reliability of mobile devices and the availability of bandwidth have made mobile computing much more viable.
“But there are still challenges in the overall performance of mobile platforms, such as the cost and scalability of systems that can provide information in real time to mobile workers,” Eilers says. He says that runtime needed to carefully evaluate new technologies, including cloud platforms, to find faster and more scalable access to data from a wide range of devices.
Solution
To facilitate what Eilers calls “some fresh thinking about integration and scalability” for the firm’s platform options, runtime decided to create an online, multiplayer action game that can accommodate large swings in the number of users, and that would give users access to rich information in the form of visually distinct characters, physical actions, cumulative game points, and other data that is stored in the cloud. “Odigene” which was built on Windows Azure, the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. The game connects to Facebook and is a browser-based, role-playing game in which players have to master different missions involving a fictitious genome disaster.
“Creating a game is outside our normal development work, but we thought it would be an excellent way to stress-test the key features in Windows Azure that we needed to address in our most common business solutions,” says Eilers. “In particular, we wanted to understand what’s involved in a cost-oriented architecture that can still deliver high performance before committing fully to an enterprise solution.”
One such business solution that runtime offers is a commerce platform—called pulsd—which provides a combination of services and software applications to customers.
“We were interested in discovering how we could implement low or zero cost of entry to our commerce platform for users, with minimal IT investment on our part, high performance for data input and requests, and the ability to rapidly scale to accommodate hundreds or thousands of new users in a matter of minutes,” Eilers says.
The game addresses technical issues that are important to understand when providing mobile access to large stores of information. For example, the game can handle hundreds or even thousands of concurrent queries—in this case, gamers hitting buttons during action sequences—to Microsoft SQL Azure, a relational cloud database service that provides access to large amounts of data in near real time.
SQL Azure and Windows Azure, which are both hosted in Microsoft data centers, also can be scaled up or down quickly, depending on the number of users. In addition, runtime used Microsoft Silverlight to create a rich user interface that has minimal performance impact on individual devices.
“In creating the game on Windows Azure, we used Microsoft .NET Framework tools and a design approach that would allow us—or our customers—to quickly modify the basic elements of the solution to meet specific needs,” says Eilers. “For our corporate customers, that represents the ability to quickly customize a core solution to fit particular tasks or business processes.”
Benefits
Runtime found Windows Azure to be an excellent platform for delivering key technology features that can advance solutions for high-performance, data-rich mobile computing. Using the Microsoft tools, the firm’s pilot project—the Odigene game—demonstrated how the cloud could be used to offer high scalability, fast performance, and high availability to meet customer needs, with minimal business risk for the firm.
Delivers Scalability to Meet Fluctuating Demand
Windows Azure is an extremely scalable platform that can accommodate sharp swings in activity—an experience typical to runtime customers, such as retailers and manufacturers with seasonal fluctuations in business.
“Windows Azure can take on many thousands of users in literally a matter of minutes, and then be scaled back down equally fast,” says Eilers. “Through the Odigene test project, we’ve been able to develop guidance and policies surrounding the automatic scaling of the Windows Azure services that we will be providing to our enterprise customers.”
The scalability provides a powerful, cost-effective solution, giving the firm’s customers the ability to pay for just what they need during peak seasons.
“This is especially important for customers like retail operations that have large spikes in traffic during holidays or promotional periods,” Eilers says. “With Windows Azure, it takes the same amount of time and effort to provide access to our services whether a customer has 50 users or 5,000 users.”
Offers Fast Performance, High Availability of Data
By taking advantage of the Windows Azure platform, runtime can deliver another key benefit to its customers—around-the-clock access to information.
“Windows Azure is completely solid in terms of reliability,” says Eilers. “Over the course of time, we experienced almost 100 percent uptime with the Windows Azure platform. And we’ve seen very responsive performance. For our business customers, that can translate into more sales over time, because they can be totally responsive to their customers.”
Provides Integration with Social Media
Eilers says the Odigene project also helped runtime understand how it could incorporate social media into its enterprise solutions and pulsd platform.“ Not only are we reusing the Facebook integration first developed for Odigene for our business-to-business services,” he says, “we are also reusing the integration services and integration agent technologies that are supported in the Windows Azure platform in customer projects.”
He adds that runtime has taken lessons learned from Odigene about integrating social media and is incorporating them into the firm’s consulting work with other independent software vendors.
Offers Powerful Business Platform for Solution Providers
Because Microsoft manages the Windows Azure platform, runtime can eliminate many of the risks to its own business that used to be commonplace. “Windows Azure allows us to execute a concept without all the investments that we used to make in servers and other infrastructure components,” Eilers says. “With Windows Azure, we have a product road map that features less heavy-weight offerings in favor of smaller, simpler, easier-to-understand services.”
Eilers says the flexibility of Windows Azure is extremely valuable when demonstrating an idea to a customer. “We can quickly show our concept to a customer, and if it works and the customer wants to proceed, we can quickly deploy the solution and bring on users.
“Equally important to us is the ability to bring other customers to the same solution using a multitenant model,” Eilers continues. “Windows Azure provides a powerful, efficient way for us as developers to do business, because it allows us to focus on creating and delivering great solutions quickly and very cost effectively.”
Microsoft Cloud Power
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 about Microsoft Cloud Power, go to:
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