Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Managed Hosting Company Rebuilds Service Platform to Meet Changing Business Needs
Overview
Country or Region :United States
Industry:Information Technology
Customer Profile
Data Return, in Irving, Texas, has been recognized for its operational excellence and technical leadership in offering a comprehensive service delivery platform for managed hosting of Web sites and Web-based applications.
Business Situation
The company’s service delivery platform, digitalOps 1.0, did not support business process revisions the company needed to make to respond to changing market needs and new customer requirements.
Solution
To better align the company’s changing business processes, Data Return used Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 and Microsoft ASP.NET to design and build digitalOps 2.0, a new version of its service delivery platform.
Benefits
Faster, richersales quotes and collateral
Simplified, improved, easy-to-maintain user interface
Smaller, more productive developer team
Personalization without custom code
/ “Out of the box, the ASP.NET 2.0 Profile object saved us hundreds of hours of time and money not having to design, build, test, and maintain it ourselves.”
Emmanuel Kothapally, Lead Developer, Data Return
Data Return, in Irving, Texas, offers managed hosting of Web sites and Web-based applications for more than 200 customers. The company’s original business model focused on standardized solutions, and so did the original version of its service delivery platform, digitalOps 1.0. However, customers began requesting customized solutions. With digitalOps increasingly unable to meet the company’s business needs, Data Return looked to Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 and Microsoft ASP.NET to help design and build a new digitalOps version 2.0. Visual Studio 2005 combined with Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 made it possible for a small team of developers to build a new system that enabled personalization without custom code. It also improved the company’s quotes and ordering process, which led to more efficient sales, and made it easy to align the new model with the company’s changed business processes.
Fast Facts
Development time / 10 months
Development team / 1 lead developer, 1 architect, 5 developers, 2 testers
Programming language / Microsoft Visual C#
Key Microsoft technologies / Microsoft Visual Studio
2005
Microsoft ASP.NET
Microsoft SQL Server
2000
Microsoft Office Visio®2003
Situation
Located in Irving,Texas, and founded in 1996, Data Return now has 280 employees and more than 200 customers for whom the company provides managed hosting of Web sites and Web-based applications. Data Return’s goal has been to offer standardized solutions to complex hosting needs and deliver these solutions to customers quickly.
Complex hosting supports transaction-intensive applications such as e-commerce or other business critical applications and infrastructure. Hosting complex sites requiresData Return to have developers on its support staff to run debugging tools, analyze logs, resolve intra-application conflicts, and work with client development teams and third-party software vendors to resolve customer problems. Data Return is one of only six companies to achieve Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner status in Hosting & Application Services.
Data Return created a service delivery platform called digitalOps 1.0 to manage its hosting and operations systems. digitalOps was built to support business processes designed around standardized products and services.
However, the business climate for hosting and managed services has changed since the company’s founding, and Data Return found more and more of its customers asking for additional customization for complex hosting capabilities. Customization has been particularly popular with small- and medium-size businesses, and Data Return’s customer-base began to reflect the shift.
As customization and support for sites became a larger and larger part of Data Return’s business, the shortcomings of digitalOps 1.0 became clear. In late 2004, the company began a redesign to align the system and its tools to the changing business needs.
Solution
A team of eight people including a lead developer, an architect, four developers, and two testers began using Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 and Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0, a set of technologies in the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 for building Web applications and Web services, to develop a new version of digitalOps.
The digitalOps 2.0 functions as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool for the entire company. All areas of the company, from operations to finance, can be handled by the new model.
The digitalOps2.0 version will consist of multiple Web applications loosely coupled and built upon a common services framework. The framework provides all participating applications the required common services, such as logging, authentication, auditing, caching, security, common controls, and a customer portal.
Users interact with digitalOps 2.0 to perform daily job functions, such as change management, resource provisioning, configuration management, monitoring, contact management, and implementation management.
The main functions of digitalOps 2.0 include:
Customer Console—to provide a customer portal.
Catalog Management—to maintain a parts catalog and product configuration.
Sales Management—to produce quotes, parts lists, and proposals.
Asset Management—to track assets and perform audits.
Inventory Management—to maintain receiving, stocking levels, and ownership records.
Customer Management—to track customers, contacts, and escalation paths.
Alert Management—to deliver aggregation, association, and resolution tools.
Change Management—to schedule changes, patches, and notifications.
Benefits
The first phase of the new version of digitalOps focuses on the Data Return sales organization and giving the sales team the tools they need to scale their organization while adding minimal headcount. Additionally, the resulting solution has proven to enhance productivity for both the development team and the Data Return sales force.
Sales Team Creates Faster Quotes and Orders
“The ability of our sales team to quickly and accurately generate the collateral they need to close business is absolutely vital to Data Return,” says Stephen Johnson, Director of System Development at Data Return. The first phase of digitalOps 2.0 simplifies the process of creating a quote for a customer and automates the process of creating sales contracts and other documents by the Data Return sales engineers. “The new version reduces the time sales engineers spend creating complex quotes and proposals from 2 to 3 hours to 30 minutes or less,” Johnson says.
Developers Experience Simplified, Improved, Easy-To-Maintain User Interface
Using Master Pages and Themes—features of ASP.NET 2.0— allowed digitalOps Web pages to be built quickly and effectively with similar-looking pages. “Master Pages gave us the flexibility and freedom to vary content pages and Master Pages independent of each other,” says Mani Subramanian, Data Return’s System Architect for the project. “This saved us a lot of time in putting up prototypes or quick samples that look like production applications.”
Themes and Master Pages allow Data Return to create a consistent user experience by simplifying the user interface, using standard controls, and reducing clutter on the pages.
In addition, the revised user interface, along with key personalization features, enables business optimization by giving both Data Return employees and customers the tools they need to function without locking them into a one-size-fits-all model.
Development Team Can be Smaller, More Productive
Using Visual Studio 2005 allowed Data Return to develop the new version of its key management tool with significantly fewer developers than the team that built the original version. “Our original development team for the first version of digitalOps had about 25 people. The team now putting together version 2.0 is much smaller, only eight people,” says Johnson.
Developers Can Personalize Without Custom Code
DigitalOps 2.0 uses the personalization features of ASP.NET 2.0 heavily in order to improve the user experience. “Out of the box, the ASP.NET 2.0 Profile object saved us hundreds of hours of time and money not having to design, build, test, and maintain it ourselves,” says Emmanuel Kothapally, Lead Developer at Data Return. The digitalOps system primarily uses personalization to store favorites and history information for users in addition to their preferred culture.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is the world’s most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows®-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2005 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development lifecycle. With Visual Studio 2005, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.
For more information on Visual Studio 2005, go to:
msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio
Acquire Visual Studio:
msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy