Windows Azure PlatformCustomer Solution Case Study

Interactive Agency Helps Mobile Carrier Speed App Distribution to 20 Million Phones

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Software engineering

Customer ProfileCypress is an interactive agency that provides full-service application design, development, and support services. The company focuses on e-commerce, digital video, and multiple-screen solutions.

Business SituationBased in Seattle, Washington, Cypress needed a way to scale its application management infrastructure to meet the need of a major wireless carrier for a highly interactive content management system.

SolutionCypress chose to adopt the Windows Azure platform, which includes Microsoft SQL Azure, to gain scalable storage, compute, networking, and content delivery capabilities.

Benefits Supports new business models Improves business agility Boosts operating efficiency

“The number one rule from our mobile services client was that their publishing tool needed to be fast, fast, fast! With SQL Azure, we built a dashboard application that performs 15 times faster than their former system.”

Frank Branch, Lead Solutions Architect, Cypress

To support a content management application for a major wireless telecommunications provider, Cypress, an interactive agency based in Seattle, Washington, needed the ability to rapidly scale its data infrastructure. To manage similar content projects in the past, it had routinely partnered with hosting agencies. However, to boost efficiency and enhance control in meeting client service level agreements, executives looked into alternative hosting models. Cypress ultimately chose to deploy the content management system it built for its client to the Windows Azure platform. By taking advantage of the highly scalable cloud-based relational database capabilities offered through Microsoft SQL Azure, the company was able to deliver a merchandise publishing solution that performs 15 times faster than its client’s previous system.

SituationCypress specializes in the development and deployment of interactive content, mobile, and e-commerce applications. Since its founding in 2001, it has built an impressive client portfolio, including high-profile brands such as Sony and Starbucks Coffee Company.

Over the years, the Seattle-based firm has typically partnered with third-party web hosting companies to deliver the applications it builds for clients. “We made a conscious business decision to outsource hosting in most cases,” says Frank Branch, Lead Solutions Architect at Cypress. “We wanted to devote internal resources to building world-class applications for our clients instead of managing server hardware.” In March 2010, a large, U.S.-based mobile telecommunications company engaged Cypress to help improve the efficiency of its content management workflow. The wireless carrier regularly distributes promotional content and prebuilt apps—from ringtones and games to special offers on text and data plans—to more than 20 million customer devices.

For several years, the wireless carrier had depended on spreadsheets and custom-built publishing tools to manage distribution of this content. Reliance on multiple, stand-alone spreadsheets created several problems. Beyond the potential risk of data loss, executives were concerned about the inefficiency of a largely iterative and manual process. For example, staff members spent a considerable amount of time reentering information from one spreadsheet to another and fixing formatting errors in documents that were

being edited numerous times a day by people across the organization.

“First and foremost, they wanted to automate their publishing process as much as possible,” says Branch. “Second, they wanted to get away from using their own network resources to store and push out large volumes of advertising content and merchandise to their customers.” Branch explains that the mobile carrier distributed this content in 100 kilobyte-sized packets to its entire customer base up to five times a week.

The mobile services provider ultimately contracted with Cypress in September 2010 to build a web-based dashboard application to replace multiple, disparate content management tools. Executives for the mobile carrier emphasized the need for a highly interactive application that was fast and simple to use, and they wanted to be able to deploy it within four months. “The key challenge for us was how to create a system that could run queries against an incredibly complex data model, and that could still deliver fast response times,” says Branch.

By working with hosting providers in the past, Cypress had avoided the need to invest in its own data center facility. But executives found that this business model had its limitations, too. “In a hosted scenario, if I noticed that one of my process threads was running slowly, I needed to call the service provider to have them deploy a new server, which could take as long as 48 hours,” says Branch. “Beyond the delay and the extra cost associated with adding hardware, we needed to spend more time managing infrastructure in general. For

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some of our more complex projects, we had multiple people working full time on monitoring application performance and troubleshooting problems.”

Branch wanted to capitalize on his team’s familiarity with the Microsoft ASP.NET web application framework and Microsoft SQL Server data management software to minimize development time. To meet the client’s requirement to manage the application offsite, Branch also needed to consider how Cypress would host the solution.

SolutionIn the course of evaluating options, Branch considered the distinct advantages offered by Windows Azure, the Microsoft cloud services development, hosting, and management environment. Because it offers platform-as-a-service capabilities built on familiar Microsoft technologies, Branch knew that his team could stay focused on application design, instead of worrying about sourcing, configuring, and managing infrastructure assets. Branch also knew that, by adopting a comprehensive cloud technology platform, his team would have the flexibility to create the solution as a standard web application and then use a set of fully integrated tools to deploy it to the cloud.

Branch was particularly eager to use Microsoft SQL Azure to rapidly scale database capacity while ensuring high levels of data protection. Part of the Windows Azure platform, SQL Azure provides cloud-based relational database capabilities based on Microsoft SQL Server technology and hosted in Microsoft data centers.

In September 2010, Cypress used Microsoft ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) 2.0, part of the ASP.NET web application framework, to begin building a custom content management system for its client. The application incorporates HTML5 and JavaScript components to provide a highly interactive user experience. Developers subsequently used Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio to convert the application to a cloud service.

Approximately four months after the start of the project, the mobile carrier was able to begin using the initial production version of the dashboard application to track distribution of apps and other merchandise to customer devices.

The dashboard uses SQL Azure to store the prebuilt apps, along with related marketing content and special offer information. As staff members contribute information throughout the editorial workflow, such as ratings of the various apps, that metadata is captured in the SQL Azure database. To enable staff to quickly find the latest information about each of the products, developers used familiarity with Microsoft Language Integrated Query (LINQ) technology, an extension of Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, to build a dynamic query library. “By using LINQ to write a type-safe querying tool, we were able to greatly enhance the search performance and interactivity of the dashboard application, without compromising data security,” says Branch.

Developers from Cypress have taken full advantage of the scalability of SQL Azure to deliver fast application performance,

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“By using LINQ to write a type-safe querying tool, we were able to greatly enhance the search performance and interactivity of the dashboard application, without compromising data security.”

Frank Branch, Lead Solutions Architect, Cypress

despite the complexity of the data model that underlies its client’s publishing workflow. “When we were first building the application, we used certain technical tricks to speed up performance,” says Branch. He explains that these techniques included downloading all of the data from the SQL Azure database to the HTML page in advance, and then using paging functionality on the client computer to retrieve and dynamically display the requested information. “We discovered that, because SQL Azure can scale to process enormously large data sets, it was much faster to directly query the database in the cloud, rather than push all of the data down to the HTML page in advance,” says Branch. “I was shocked by how much of a performance boost we gained from using SQL Azure.”

In August 2011, Cypress introduced the second version of the dashboard application, which uses worker roles together with Blob storage to automate image-processing tasks. Previously, staff members needed to manually resize the image assets associated with each particular app before distributing the apps to customer devices, which could delay publishing by several hours. Now, when staff members upload images, they are automatically formatted for distribution within a matter of minutes. The images are then sent to a Blob storage location on Windows Azure, where they can then be downloaded to consumer devices.

In the coming months, Cypress is set to release additional updates that will help its client manage merchandise more efficiently on other internal sites. “As we work with our client to create a roadmap for this

application, we know we can build what they’re asking for because the tool sets already exist in Windows Azure,” says Branch. “It makes it very easy for us to estimate and plan out future releases.”

BenefitsBy adopting the Windows Azure platform, Cypress successfully met the complex content management needs of a mobile carrier that had more than 20 million customer devices in market, all while increasing its own operational efficiency.

Increased Agility to Support New Business ModelsCypress now has the flexibility to provide hosting capabilities directly to clients as part of a comprehensive service offering, something it was not able to do in the past. “We can serve as a one-stop shop to meet all of our clients’ needs, which fits with our identity as an agile agency that you can turn to solve complex challenges,” says Branch. By using Windows Azure platform components, including SQL Azure, the company has a cost-effective way to help clients build new solutions and move existing applications to the cloud without investing in data center infrastructure. “With SQL Azure, we can scale our data infrastructure in seconds with a fraction of the support overhead, which gives us the ability to compete with much larger interactive agencies,” says Branch. Enhanced Ability to Meet Challenging Project RequirementsBy using the highly available and scalable relational database capabilities offered by SQL Azure, Cypress can build applications that incorporate massive data sets without sacrificing performance. “The number one

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rule from our mobile services client was that their publishing tool needed to be fast, fast, fast!” says Branch. “With SQL Azure, we built a dashboard application that performs 15 times faster than their former system.” This improvement in efficiency represents a savings of more than 20 hours a week. Since the release of the first version of the solution in April 2011, the mobile carrier has saved several hundred hours of labor time.

Greater Operational EfficiencyCypress was able to use in-house skills to quickly develop, deploy, and upgrade the content management application it created for a large mobile carrier. And it has been able to manage the infrastructure for this application with fewer staffing resources than it previously required for projects of similar scope. “The person who covers our internal IT operations also administers two large client projects, including the huge content application we delivered to the mobile services provider,” says Branch. “This efficiency gain is a direct result of moving to Windows Azure. And it gives a strong competitive advantage in winning larger deals going forward.”

Windows Azure PlatformThe 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.

To learn more, visit: www.microsoft.com/windowsazure www.sqlazure.com

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Cypress products and services, call (206) 281-8240 or visit the website at: www.cypressconsulting.net

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published November 2011

Software and Services Windows Azure Platform− Microsoft SQL Azure− Windows Azure

Technologies− Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5− Microsoft .NET Language Integrated

Query