Partner Solution Case Study
/ Communications Firm Reduces Costs, Creates Opportunities with Cloud Services
Overview
Country or Region:United Kingdom
Industry:Professional services—Corporate communications
Partner Profile
MerchantCantos is a creative communications business offering integrated communication solutions for midsize and enterprise customers, with expertise in digital, print, and video.
Business Situation
The company needed to reduce the time, cost, and complexity of deploying its solutions, ensure reliable availability and system performance for its customers, and decrease its administrative costs.
Solution
MerchantCantos built and hosted a customer’s corporate website using Windows Azure and Microsoft SQL Azure, and integrated the site with the Umbraco open-source web content management system.
Benefits
- Reduced cost and complexity
- Reliable, high performance
- New business opportunities
Mark Stephens, Director of Digital, MerchantCantos
MerchantCantos previously relied on local data-center hosting providers to support its integrated communications and corporate-website solutions. Unfortunately, the company still found itself responsible for the administration and management of its customers’ server environments, a situation that added time to projects and reduced project margins. MerchantCantos needed to ensure reliable performance for its customers and reduce the time, cost, and complexity associated with deploying its web solutions. So the company built and hosted a customer’s corporate website using Windows Azure, and now MerchantCantos is using Windows Azure to help reduce costs, simplify service delivery, and create new business opportunities.
Situation
MerchantCantos delivers creative corporate communications for customers that range from midsize businesses to global enterprises, including some of the largest companies listed on the London Stock Exchange. Based in London, United Kingdom, MerchantCantos has 74 employees and satellite offices in Paris, France, and Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
With expertise in digital, print, and video communication, MerchantCantos works in partnership with its customers to deliver strategic communications programs realized across multiple channels. These services include the creation of websites, mobile applications, and video content.
To deliver these services,MerchantCantos has relied on a variety of data-center hosting providers. Unfortunately, the company found that value and service delivery were inconsistent among providers. Most hosting providers offered little more than basic data-center infrastructure; the responsibility for configuration, maintenance, and general administration of the server environment almost always fell to MerchantCantos.
“It was taking more infrastructure expertise than we wanted to develop in-house,” says Mark Stephens, Director of Digital at MerchantCantos. “We are experts in advising how our clients can communicate and in developing effective communication solutions, and we had no desire to develop a set of skills that we do not sell.”
The situation was creating serious business impacts: establishing a hosting relationship and configuring a server environment could add days to a project, and the resulting ongoing administration requirements were reducing the company’s project margins. “Infrastructure issues generated a lot of costs that we could not pass on to the customer,” says Stephens.
MerchantCantos needed to reduce the time, cost, and complexity of deploying its solutions, ensure reliable availability and system performance, and decrease its ongoing administrative costs. The company saw that it could resolve some of these challenges by delivering infrastructure support for its customers with cloud technology—offsite computing resources delivered as services over the Internet.
“We needed an infrastructure solution that would be more resilient, more robust, and easier to manage than just installing servers in a data center,” says Stephens. “We knew that there must be a better way, and that brought us to the cloud.”
Solution
In late 2010, a large global retailer asked MerchantCantos to help redesign and deploy its corporate website. The high-traffic website was a critical component of the retailer’s business, but its hosting provider had not delivered consistent site availability or adequate responsiveness to peaks in site traffic. The retailer also wanted to replace its cumbersome web content management system (CMS), and it wanted to launch the rebuilt site in time for the public announcement of a senior management change and the release of the company’s annual financial report.
After evaluating several cloud services, MerchantCantos decided to build and host its customer’s corporate website with Windows Azure, the Microsoft cloud service development, hosting, and management environment. Windows Azure provides on-demand compute, storage, networking, and content delivery capabilities through Microsoft data centers. “We looked at a variety of cloud providers here in the United Kingdom,” says Stephens. “For our requirements, Windows Azure was the most efficient and cost-effective, and it has the functionality our customers need. It was the obvious choice.”
MerchantCantos developed the website using the Microsoft ASP.NET development framework and then deployed the finished environment in Windows Azure. The company worked with Umbraco, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, to integrate the website with the Umbraco open-source CMS, also powered by Windows Azure. According to Stephens, the Umbraco CMS provided the robust, efficient, and easy-to-use content management capabilities that the retailer needed, and because the Umbraco CMS was already running in Windows Azure, it was easy for MerchantCantos to incorporate it into its customer’s website.
The company began the project in January 2011 and delivered the redesigned website to its customer by the end of May. MerchantCantos and its customer use computing resources in Windows Azure to run the website, Microsoft SQL Azure and Azure Storage to manage media files and other data, and the Umbraco CMS to update and manage content on the site.
With the global capacity of Windows Azure and the Microsoft assurance of 99.9 percent availability, MerchantCantos delivered the computing power and reliability that its customer needed without increasing its own IT management burden. The retailer manages almost all the content on its website, and MerchantCantos has virtually no infrastructure management responsibilities. Its customer simply pays a monthly subscription fee based on the Windows Azure resources that it uses, and can instantly scale up or down to meet website demand.
Because Windows Azure interoperates easily with a range of web services, development languages, and internet protocols, developers at MerchantCantos could build the website with techniques and technologies that they already knew, such as the Microsoft Visual Studio development system, VisualC#, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), and jQuery.
“With Windows Azure, we did not have to learn anything new and we could use the same set of tools that we have always used,” says Stephens. “Not having to focus resources on learning new technology or acquiring new skill sets was very important to us.”
Benefits
MerchantCantos is using the Windows Azure platform to simplify service delivery, reduce administrative costs, and increase project margin. With the computing, storage, and development resources in Windows Azure and SQL Azure, MerchantCantos can deliver high-performance communication solutions to customers, focus its resources on its core business, accelerate sales cycles, and create new business opportunities.
Reduced Cost and Complexity
By using Windows Azure to deliver computing resources for its communication solutions, MerchantCantos has simplified service delivery and reduced its administrative costs. “By using Windows Azure, we will save two to five days per project that we would have spent dealing with infrastructure, and we expect to increase our project margin as a result,” says Stephens.
MerchantCantos has also reduced the complexity associated with serving its customers, so it can focus on the skills and expertise that it can sell. “We are in the communications business, not the hosting business, and we want it to stay that way,” says Stephens. “With Windows Azure, we can focus on our core business.”
Reliable, High Performance
With the vast computing, storage, and development capacity in Windows Azure, MerchantCantos can deliver high-performance solutions that are robust, scalable, easy to manage, and reliable. Customers don’t have to worry about availability for their solutions or whether their websites will respond adequately to peaks in traffic, and as their needs change, they can scale their Windows Azure resources up or down almost instantly, without having to install or uninstall server infrastructure.
“I wish we hosted everything on Windows Azure,” says Stephens. “It has no drawbacks for us. It is scalable, resilient, and able to cope with peaks in load. It frees us from having to worry so much about the infrastructure.”
New Business Opportunities
Within weeks of deploying its customer’s corporate website, MerchantCantos was proposing more large-scale solutions powered by Windows Azure to new and existing customers. The company anticipates using Windows Azure to deploy almost all of its customers’ mission-critical websites. “We intend to make Windows Azure a very big part of our business from now on,” says Stephens. “Within 12 months, we expect to deliver 60 to 70 percent of our customer projects via Windows Azure.”
Stephens says that MerchantCantos account representatives can use the strong market presence and reputation of Microsoft to help start conversations with customers, and that using Windows Azure will simplify and accelerate sales processes.
“Because service can be an issue with some local data centers, our customers often expressed concern about lesser-known providers,” he says. “By using Windows Azure, we can provide customers with confidence that we will deliver the communication solutions that they need.”
Windows Azure Platform
The Windows Azure platform provides developers the functionality to build applications that span from consumer to enterprise scenarios. The key components of the Windows Azure platform are:
- 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, bandwidth, content delivery, middleware, and marketplace capabilities to build, host, and scale web applications through Microsoft data centers.
- Microsoft SQL Azure. Microsoft SQL Azure is a self-managed, multitenant relational cloud database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies. It provides built-in high availability, fault tolerance, and scale-out database capabilities, as well as cloud-based data synchronization and reporting, to build custom enterprise and web applications and extend the reach of data assets.
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