Microsoft Announces New Cloud Opportunities for Partners

Press release:

Microsoft Announces New Cloud Opportunities for Partners

July 10, 2012

New guidance, training and programs for Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure unveiled at Worldwide Partner Conference.

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TORONTO — July 10, 2012 — During the second day of Microsoft Corp.’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), top executives from the company announced new training, tools and other programs that enable partners to deliver compelling new cloud services to their customers. Satya Nadella, president of the Server and Tools Business, announced a community technology preview (CTP) of new technologies that enable hosting service providers to use their Windows Server data centers to deliver capabilities consistent with services running in Windows Azure. In addition, he announced a new program that gives partners guidance, training and software tools to help customers transition from VMware’s virtual infrastructure to Microsoft’s cloud.

“We’ve taken everything that we’ve learned from running data centers and services at a global scale to usher in the new era of the cloud OS,” Nadella said. “Microsoft offers partners modern yet familiar technology to meet customer demand on their path to the cloud.”

With the new CTP, hosting service providers can offer customers turnkey cloud services, including high-scale websites and virtual machine hosting with an extensible self-service portal experience. These capabilities, which run on Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft System Center 2012, will offer hosting providers some of the same experiences and services recently announced by Windows Azure. Go Daddy, the largest global Web hoster, is piloting these new capabilities to deliver new cloud services for customers.

“Customers view Go Daddy as an IT partner with which they can grow,” said Scott Brown, vice president of Product Development – Hosting at Go Daddy. “These new capabilities give customers a seamless path to expanding their online presence. In addition, the improved site performance, scalability and availability all lead to a more enjoyable experience for our customers and their visitors.”

In addition, the new program announced on stage, Switch to Hyper-V, will allow partners to grow their virtualization, private and hybrid cloud computing practices while also helping customers improve IT agility at a lower cost with Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.

Already, partners are making significant progress in helping their customers with this transition. Microsoft Gold Certified Partner FyrSoft recently helped Iowa-based Pella Corp. migrate nearly 100 percent of its VMware infrastructure — nearly 700 VMware virtual machines — to Hyper-V, moving the company beyond virtualization to a private cloud solution. With the Microsoft private cloud, Pella has evolved its business while reducing IT costs and improving efficiencies. Server and Tools Business Corporate Vice President Takeshi Numoto further details partner opportunities in the era of the cloud OS on a blog published today, and more information can be found here.

In addition, in a keynote that further reinforced how Microsoft is working with its partners to transform businesses throughout the world, Microsoft Business Solutions President Kirill Tatarinov highlighted the incredible opportunity in the year ahead for partners focused on selling business solutions based on Microsoft Dynamics.

“Microsoft brings together technologies in a way that no other company can match,” Tatarinov said. “Microsoft Dynamics takes full advantage of the amazing innovations Microsoft is delivering, and we’re actively supporting our partners in developing and delivering a complete, modern, flexible and cloud-based business solution to grow their businesses. There’s never been a better moment to be a Microsoft Dynamics partner.”

With a renewed focus on building enterprise partnerships, Microsoft announced new global independent software vendors that are choosing or extending their solutions across Microsoft Dynamics. Companies such as Campus Management Corp., Cenium Inc., Cincom Systems Inc., PROS Pricing and Technosoft that are industry leaders in their markets are embracing the Microsoft Dynamics solutions to expand their offerings and in some cases as the core foundation on which to build their unique industry-focused solutions. For instance, global hospitality and hotel solution organization Cenium is extending its Microsoft Dynamics-based business offerings in areas such as property management, procurement, human resources and point of sale; and Campus Management, a leading provider of enterprise software solutions for higher education, is planning to expand global reach by leveraging Microsoft Dynamics AX and providing institutions of any size or complexity more choices when it comes to student information systems and enterprise resource planning solutions.

Other keynotes included the following news and momentum updates from Microsoft senior executives:

• Thom Gruhler, corporate vice president of Windows Phone Marketing, took the stage to demo Windows Phone 8 and highlight that Windows Phone is now a true extension of the Windows that 1 billion users worldwide know and use today.

• Laura Ipsen, corporate vice president of Worldwide Public Sector, provided an overview of Microsoft’s National Plan and citizenship efforts, including empowering youth and driving societal change through the proliferation of Microsoft technology.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Herbalife Hosts Independent Distributors’ Custom Websites on Windows Azure

Press release:

Herbalife Hosts Independent Distributors’ Custom Websites on Windows Azure

May 29, 2012

Nutrition company chooses Microsoft to help independent distributors expand their businesses.

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REDMOND, Wash. — May 29, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. has announced the Herbalife Ltd. Inc. decision to host its global distributors’ websites on Windows Azure. The nutrition company is now offering its independent distributors the option to create custom retail websites to help them expand their businesses. By building the website platform on Windows Azure, Herbalife substantially reduced its time to market, eliminated the need for significant capital investment and made it possible for the company to react to changing capacity demands in real time.

Herbalife wanted to give its distributors in more than 80 countries the opportunity to build customized retail experiences for shoppers. However, the costs needed to support the creation of individual websites for its distributors worldwide would have been massive if Herbalife had taken on all the work: licensing, obtaining hardware and constructing datacenters. Herbalife wanted to roll out this offering slowly to ensure that it had the features distributors needed. However, the company also required an infrastructure with the flexibility to rapidly scale across markets once the base offering was in place: attempting to do both without the cloud would have introduced significant risk.

Herbalife turned to the cloud to find a solution. Herbalife discovered that Windows Azure provided both flexibility and cost efficiencies needed to help it meet its business goals and now has the scalability and flexibility it needs, with Herbalife independent distributors on track to launch a projected 100,000 retail websites within the first three years of deployment.

“Herbalife was able to use its existing Microsoft ASP.NET expertise and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate tools to create the cloud-based website platform it wanted,” said Doug Hauger, general manager, Windows Azure, Microsoft Corp. “This kind of global consistency will help keep Herbalife’s independent distributors on the forefront of retail website strategies.” 

More information is available on the Microsoft Customer Spotlight newsroom.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. 

Windows Azure Is the Right Solution for Soluto

Press release:

Windows Azure Is the Right Solution for Soluto

May 23, 2012

Home PC management startup chooses Microsoft cloud service to help it scale after a big win.

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REDMOND, Wash. — May 23, 2012 — TechCrunch Disrupt winner Soluto, a home PC remote-management startup, has switched to Windows Azure to help deliver its tool to more than 3 million PCs worldwide, maintain its market momentum and uncap its business potential. By adopting Windows Azure, Soluto solved scaling issues that arose after it won the worldwide competition for IT startups.

Soluto uses Windows Azure table storage to save PC data, deliver it to users and process it with data from other machines. Soluto users generate tens of millions of data transactions every day, making Soluto one of the largest consumers of Windows Azure resources among startups worldwide.

“Using Windows Azure, we have the capacity to process hundreds of terabytes of data,” said Tomer Dvir, co-founder and CEO of Soluto. “That releases our growth potential and gives us the agility to watch the market evolve, learn from our customers, enhance our products and develop a profitable model.”

In May 2010, Dvir and Ishay Green publicly launched Soluto at the inaugural TechCrunch Disrupt. Soluto won Best of Show, and suddenly the company had media coverage in global outlets such as The New York Times, CNN and the BBC. In the month after TechCrunch Disrupt, almost 1 million people downloaded Soluto.

“Our server environment couldn't scale up fast enough,” said Roee Adler, chief product officer at Soluto. “We needed a better, more flexible solution, but we still wanted to avoid the risk of a big IT investment.”

The team expected that transferring a live application to the cloud would be challenging, and it quickly determined that it could support Soluto most effectively with Windows Azure. “Because we could work with familiar tools, such as the .NET Framework and Visual Studio, we knew that we could get to market much faster with Windows Azure than we would with Amazon,” Adler said.

After migrating to Windows Azure, Soluto has grown rapidly. By October 2011, the application had 3 million downloads. Demand can spike by as much as 30 million transactions per day, but the Soluto team can quickly and easily scale Windows Azure to avoid any break in service.

“With Windows Azure, we have complete elasticity and endless scalability,” Dvir said. “We are ready to serve any peak in consumer demand.”

For more customer success stories, visit http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/presskits/customerspotlight.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

MediaValet Thrives on Microsoft’s Cloud Platform

Press release:

MediaValet Thrives on Microsoft’s Cloud Platform

May 01, 2012

Built from the ground up on Windows Azure by one of the world’s largest photography companies, MediaValet is challenging the status quo of a billion-dollar global industry.

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VANCOUVER, Canada — May 1, 2012 — Global content services and photography provider VRX Studios turned to Microsoft’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud platform, Windows Azure, to replace its costly, unscalable, server-based digital asset management system and, in the process, developed one of the world’s first 100 percent cloud-based digital asset management systems. Built 100 percent from the ground up on Windows Azure, MediaValet can scale to meet the needs of any size company, in any industry, and is available on datacenters around the world. Today MediaValet is a stand-alone service that is quickly gaining market share in a 20-year-old, billion-dollar, global industry.

“The moment we launched MediaValet, we were competing head-to-head, on a global stage, with the largest digital asset management software providers on the planet,” said David MacLaren, founder and CEO of VRX Studios and now of MediaValet. “Windows Azure enabled us to harness more than a decade of experience in producing, managing, distributing and licensing digital media to build an enterprise-class digital asset management system — in less than 12 months — that can compete with the best and biggest in the digital asset management industry.”

Windows Azure enables MediaValet to scale in real time to accommodate its customers’ daily storage, bandwidth and computing requirements as well as easily and cost-effectively scale over time to meet the company’s long-term needs. Azure deployment eliminated the formidable upfront investment and ongoing maintenance costs faced by MediaValet in providing a digital asset management system that is available on datacenters throughout North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

In considering their options, the MediaValet team contemplated Amazon Web Services and Google Apps but found neither met their needs. “We turned to Windows Azure because it gave us the tools, the infrastructure and the support to solve our short- and long-term business challenges,” MacLaren said. “As a platform-as-a-service cloud offering, Azure lets us focus all our resources on building the solution we required and left building, managing and maintaining the global infrastructure that we required entirely up to Microsoft.”

The VRX Studios team initially pitched their new digital asset management system to travel and hospitality companies, which made up the bulk of their customer list; however, the surprising range of businesses calling for service estimates post-launch compelled the team to expand their sales and marketing efforts to cover all industries on all continents. With the realization that managing digital assets had become a daunting challenge for companies of all sizes all over the world, MacLaren decided to build a new team to focus solely on this new opportunity. That new team became MediaValet.

The scalability of Window Azure enabled MediaValet to meet the needs of small regional companies with hundreds of gigabytes of assets and a few dozen users all the way up to multinational corporations with terabytes of assets and tens of thousands of users. In addition to MediaValet’s inherent scalability, Microsoft Corp.’s global network of datacenters allowed MediaValet to offer its digital asset management services on a global scale on the day it launched, enabling real-time access to a company’s digital assets. Other key features that MediaValet inherited include triple redundancy and geo-replication, which provides backup against regional disasters or conflicts. All in all, Windows Azure helped MediaValet launch a world-class digital asset management system in half the time and for half the investment than was previously possible.

“On day one we came to market with an industry-leading set of features and benefits, delivered on a global scale, that no one could match for the price,” MacLaren said. “Before Azure, building and launching such a system was practically impossible unless you were heavily funded and had a massive IT team.”

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Essar Group Unleashes Power of the Cloud With Windows Azure

Press release:

Essar Group Unleashes Power of the Cloud With Windows Azure

April 30, 2012

Multinational conglomerate reduces level of IT maintenance and cuts costs by nearly 65 percent while improving scalability with Microsoft’s cloud technology.

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MUMBAI, India — April 30, 2012 — In an effort to offer its customers Web-based applications with high performance and scalability while maintaining low infrastructure and management costs, multinational conglomerate Essar Group has implemented Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud services platform, to deliver some of its applications.

A leader in various business sectors, including steel, energy, power, communications, shipping ports, logistics and construction, and with operations in more than 25 countries across five continents and revenues at $17 billion (U.S.), Essar remains competitive in an aggressive marketplace through a focused effort on superior customer service. With its enterprise customers in mind, the company sought to enhance its offerings with a cloud version of some of its applications.

Microsoft Services approached Essar with a cost-effective solution in Windows Azure that allowed the company to obtain the benefits of both public and private cloud computing while also reducing the level of IT maintenance required to manage the applications on-premises. Because it is hosted in Microsoft datacenters, Windows Azure is able to provide developers with on-demand computing and storage, as well as the ability to scale and manage Web applications.

Essar expects that the delivery of its applications through Windows Azure will enable the company to increase profitability and reduce costs by as much as 65 percent. Because IT staff members are also no longer allocating time to infrastructure management, they can devote more time to mission-critical operations.

“With Windows Azure, we don’t have to spend money on hardware and software, and we don’t have to spend time on administrative tasks related to infrastructure,” said Jayantha Prabhu, chief technology officer, Essar Group. “A scalable, well-defined platform gives us much fewer problems to solve and more time to focus on the overall experience of the application.”

In coordination with MindTree, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that delivers a broad range of IT services and software product engineering, Essar seamlessly transitioned four of its applications — HSECAR (Corrective Action Report (CAR) system), AVID (A Voyage into Insatiable Discovery), Saksham and Visitor Management System & Gate Pass System — to the Windows Azure platform in August 2011.

Since implementation, Essar has already experienced the multiple benefits of Microsoft’s cloud technology. “We quickly knew that we had made the best choice in selecting Windows Azure,” Prabhu said.

In addition to cutting costs, Windows Azure has given Essar the flexibility to scale compute and storage resources up and down as needed. “In fact, we can maintain the high level of scalability needed at a lower total cost of ownership compared with an on-premises solution,” Prabhu said.

More information on the Essar Group’s move to Windows Azure is available in the Microsoft case study and Microsoft Customer Spotlight newsroom.

More information on the services offered by MindTree is available at the company’s website.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.