Requirements
With an always-on, global audience for business systems, it's vital the platform they are delivered from is secure and reliable. With most enterprise customers having made substantial existing investments on-premises, it's also important that the platform works seamlessly alongside them to minimise disruption to the client's core business. With IT budgets squeezed, it's paramount that the platform doesn't bring additional management overheads and needs to look after itself. Time to market is more important today than ever. An agile enterprise needs the ability to rapidly provision and scale information systems.
With global clients, it's an advantage to use a platform that has a global reach, allowing the company to roll-out its solution to other territories as time goes on, while delivering top-notch security and controlling where data is hosted for legal and performance reasons. Finally, an ability to scale up and down to fit customers' changing business needs is a massive benefit.
"There's a big misconception that Azure is just for Microsoft development; that if you're a Microsoft shop, then you can use Azure. That's not the case at all. It's actually the most open platform of any that are out there."
Dan Scarfe, Chief Executive, Dot Net Solutions
The Solution
In all these situations, the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform provided the best, most practical solution.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Dot Net became involved with Windows Azure at the earliest, pre-release stage. When it came to converting data for the Wikipedia Explorer demonstration, it soon became apparent that Microsoft's new technology was a great way forward. "We needed massive amounts of compute power for short periods of time." explains Dan Scarfe, the company's Chief Executive. "We'd literally hit a brick wall; unless we wanted to buy fifty servers, we just couldn't do it. So we had a particular scenario that was a great fit for the cloud, and we worked very closely with Microsoft to port that to Azure." Using fifty virtual server instances in Windows Azure, Dot Net was able to complete the same task that would have taken a single physical server months to complete in just a couple of days.
With the multinational retailer, Dot Net designed and developed an application based on Windows Azure, which operated as a layer on top of the existing CRM solution and published data from it to the cloud. As the Azure platform is maintained and secured by Microsoft, there is minimal additional workload for the client's small in-house team, yet the application could be quickly rolled-out across the globe, without having to spend months designing, procuring and deploying a global infrastructure.
Dot Net Solution worked with Enteraction to build a Windows Azure application, GameShaper, which allows social games to be built rapidly and scaled globally, on demand and in no time at all.
Meanwhile, Windows Azure has become Dot Net's preferred platform when creating or porting applications for 'the cloud'. Working with businesses such as 360Lifecycle and PensionDCisions, Dot Net has used Windows Azure to build feature-rich, user-friendly applications that leverage the advantages of cloud computing and help the companies concerned win new business.
