Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Education
Customer Profile
Eduify, based in San Francisco, California, provides Web-based solutions that help students conduct research faster, write better papers, and get help ondemand.
Business Situation
Eduify wanted to speed time-to-market for a software-plus-services solution that would give students more effective assistance with writing assignments than they could get over the Web alone.
Solution
The company achieved fast time-to-market by adopting the Azure™ Services Platform and Windows Mobile® 6, and participating in the Microsoft® BizSpark™ program for startup companies.
Benefits
Cuts time-to-market by 40 percent
Enables more effective software development
Provides access to largest market for mobile devices / “The faster time-to-market that we got with BizSpark and Azure are crucial to our success. It gives us an important competitive advantage, and it helps prove our business strategy with investors.”
Dan Merritts, Vice President of Marketing, Eduify
Eduify was founded to provide students with educational technology that can assist them in researching topics faster and writing better. To create its solution, Eduify received assistance as well, from Microsoft® technologies and services such as the Azure™ Services Platform, the Microsoft BizSpark™ ecosystem, and Windows Mobile® 6. Eduify took advantage of these technological and business resources to create a software-plus-services solution that delivers online writing help to students anywhere, anytime, with functionality and a user experience not possible from the Web alone. At the same time, Eduify gained a 40 percent faster time-to-market, U.S.$500,000 in development and other savings, and easier access to the largest market of mobile device users.
Situation
More than 32 million students in the United States struggle with writing assignments because they lack the technology and immediate help they need to succeed, according to researchcited. Furthermore, nearly four out of five high school students are not proficient writers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
“Eduify’s founder saw these problems up close a few years ago, when he worked to place promising high school and college interns with business mentors in Silicon Valley,” says Dan Merritts, Vice President of Marketing at Eduify. At the end of each summer, the students were assigned a paper to write about the experience. “Students continually encountered problems when completing the assignment,” Merritts explains. “These were bright kids, but they lacked the productivity tools they needed to be successful, and they lacked access to help when and where they needed it most—which could be at home, at 2:00 A.M., the night before the assignment was due.”
Eduify was founded to address these problems. The company’s primary business goal was to create a solution that students could access anytime and anywhere to help them write better. “The days of students doing all of their research and schoolwork in the library are long gone,” says Merritts. For students, a solution has to provide the technologies that they might otherwise lack at any given moment: appropriate word processing software, file storage, and research tools.
Another key requirement is the ability to address problems that students might have at any junction during the typical academic writing process: formulating an outline, writing a draft, discovering and capturing research, and managing peer edits or multiple drafts. Eduify wanted its solution to include writing tutorials and examples, safeguards against plagiarism, and expert writing coaching on demand. Because students often work in groups or seek advice from friends on social networks such as Facebook, Eduify also wanted its solution to include connections into students’ social environments.
The Internet is a natural platform for this anywhere-anytime service. Yet, the Internet alone cannot support all the features and services that Eduify envisioned. For example, the company wanted to help students capture research from physical sources, such as books in school libraries, which suggested a role for mobile devices. And it wanted its solution to be accessible from the productivity toolsthat students already used, such as word processing software.
As a startup company, Eduify needed technology that was as cost-effective as possible. At the same time, it needed that technology to be easy to use and scalable to support what the company hoped would be massive growth over the next few years.
Solution
To address its needs for a solution that would function from the Internet and also provide software resources for services that could not be based on the Web, Eduify adopted a software-plus-services approach. This approach makes it possible to take advantage of capabilities both of the Web and of the software on a student’s local PC or device, wherever that might be. At the heart of the Eduify solution are:
Collaborative workspaces with file storage, a student-focused document editor, sharing through Facebook, instant messaging, and much more.
Research tools to discover relevant quotes and resources as a student writes, to share references with peers, and to automatically capture new content with its bibliographic information.
Help services to identify experts in a student’s network, to become a help to others, and to obtain fee-based expert writing help.
“Cloud Services” Platform
Eduify did not want to reinvent the wheel nor, in this case, the Web platform and services it would need for its solution. Several commercially available Internet “cloud services” platforms exist that can both host a Web-based solution and provide many of the building blocks comprised by that solution. Eduify chose the Azure™ Services Platform, an Internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft® data centers, because it was the fastest to deploy and scale, as well as to integrate value-added services, such as file synchronization or instant messaging.
Among the Azure services that Eduify used are ones that:
Authenticate users and provide access to its solution.
Integrate the solution with the cloud environment and enable the solution to integrate with third-party systemssuch as Facebook.
Help to rapidly extend the solution across mobile devices and the Web.
Enable users to connect with more than 320 million Windows Live™ Messenger users worldwide to collaborate and solicit help on writing projects.
Enable users to store their work in the “cloud,” to access it later from any Internet-connected PC or device.
No-Cost License Support for Startups
Eduify faced the need to buy licenses for the Windows Server® software and various Microsoft application platform components it would need for its solution—expenses that could have limited its development speed and hurt time-to-market, and that it would not have incurred with another software choice, such as Linux-based open source software.
To gain the benefits of Microsoft technol-ogies with the cost advantages of open source software, Eduify joined the Microsoft BizSpark™ program, which was designed especially for startup companies. The BizSpark program provided Eduify with access to software, support, and a rich, vibrant ecosystem of peers, partners, and support resources around the globe.
The development tools, platform technologies, and production licenses available through BizSpark include the full Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Suite with MSDN® Premium subscription, production use rights to host a Web-based solution using many of the latest components of the Microsoft application platform, and eligibility for Azure and other Microsoft offerings.
Mobile and Office Business Application Support
Of course, students interact not only with the online environment, but also with the physical environment. To enable students to capture and use physical research materials such as library books, Eduify used the Microsoft Compact Framework to put its solution on Windows Mobile® phones.
With an Eduify mobile application on their Windows Mobile phone, students can capture a source and add it to their research bibliography by taking a picture of the book’s ISBN barcode. Then, students can take a picture of the page with the quote they want to cite in their papers. Students can add the quote to their papers with a single click and the bibliography is automatically created for them.
The Eduify solution thrives on the Web, but students may not be on the Web when they want to use it; for instance, they may be working in their word processor. To make it possible for students to access the rich resources of the Eduify solution from within Microsoft Office 2007 programs—in this case, from within Microsoft Office Word 2007—Eduify plans to create an Office Business Application that gives students access to its services right from the Microsoft Office Fluent™ Ribbon.
Benefits
By using such resources asthe BizSpark program, the Azure Services Platform, and Windows Mobile to build its solution, Eduify attained faster and more cost-effective time-to-market; the scalability, availability, and security its solution required; and access to the largest market for mobile devices.
Cuts Time-to-Market by 40 Percent, Saves $500,000
Merritts estimates that the combination of the Microsoft BizSpark program and the Azure Services Platform shaved five months and U.S.$500,000 off his company’s development time and marketing budget. The Eduify mobile application, for example, was developed in just one month—compared to the six months that Merritts estimates it would have taken otherwise, saving 83 percent of development time.
“The faster time-to-market that we got with BizSpark and Azure are crucial to our success,” says Merritts. “It gives us an important competitive advantage, and it helps prove our business strategy with investors. Saving half a million dollars would be huge for any company—for a startup, it can make the difference between success and failure.”
Eduify took advantage all of the key advantages of BizSpark; most notably, software licensing benefits, priority access to Microsoft support, and access to the global BizSpark community. For example, it has teamed with another business in the education market—one that it met through BizSpark—that offers services to schools for analyzing student performance. The two companies plan to provide virtual, or online, schools with the Eduify writing-help platform to improve writing proficiency.
Eduify also gained important benefits when it chose to develop in the Microsoft .NET environment, as opposed to competing environments, such as Java.“The ecosystem for Microsoft .NET developers is vastly larger than the ecosystem for Java,” says Merritts. “That meant we were able to find quality developers more easily, at more cost-effective rates. The choice of Microsoft enabled us to go with an offshore development model that saved us money at a time when cash was at a premium.”
Enables More Effective Development
Choosing Azure over competing cloud services environments, such as Amazon, was also an important choice, for several reasons. For one, it enabled developers to work more effectively. “We wanted a best-of-breed platform,” says Merritts. “Azure gave our developers a way to develop Eduify locally, on their own computers, rather than having to go back to the cloud for each step of development. We knew that would speed development.”
Beyond faster time-to-market, the choice of Azure also delivered key technical benefits for Eduify, including cost-effective scalability and enhanced availability and security. “Azure gives us all the building blocks we need for a superior cloud computing solution,” says Merritts. “It allows us to focus on the added value we bring to education, rather than having to create the ‘plumbing’ for ourselves. We know that this solution is going to be fast and available 24/7, which is essential to our offering. Additionally, and more importantly for upholding privacy standards, we know that it will have the security of Microsoft-based authentication and access control, another key requirement in getting students to be comfortable with Eduify.”
Merritts says he sees those benefits extending into the future. “The Azure platform makes it possible for us to grow our solution as fast as the market requires,” he says. “Technology isn’t going to hold us back; it’s going to be a key driver of our business growth.”
Provides Access to Largest Market for Mobile Devices
Using Windows Mobile as the platform for the Eduify mobile solution is beneficial to both Eduify and its customers. The company takes full advantage of Windows Mobile phone features—including keyboard and superior cameras—to deliver a solution that goes beyond the capabilities of the Web alone.
Windows Mobile gives Eduify access to theplatform’s 30 million customers, up to two-thirds larger than the markets for competing mobile platforms. “Windows Mobile helps us to capture a larger share of the market faster,” says Merritts. “It also gives our customers more choice in the phones they use. Microsoft is investing in the education market with Windows Mobile, which further extends our reach and distribution. From a technology standpoint, going with Windows Mobile was a way to exploit our existing expertise with .NET to easily extend our services to the mobile world.”
Software-plus-Services
Software-plus-services is an industry shift driven by the fast-growing recognition that combining Internet services with client and server software can deliver exciting new opportunities. Microsoft is dedicated to helping individuals and businesses take advantage of these opportunities. By bringing together the best of both software and services, we maximize capabilities, choice, and flexibility for our customers. The broad software-plus-services approach unites multiple industry phenomena including software as a service, service-oriented development, and the Web 2.0 user experience under a common umbrella.
For more information about software-plus-services, go to: