Increased Speed

• Decreased costs
• Increased speed
• Tightly integrated technologies
• Improved reliability
• Enhanced scalability

Situation

Glen Knowles, the Cofounder of Kelly Street Digital, started his company after working for many years directing marketing campaigns. While working at a major advertising firm in Australia, he was constantly frustrated because he was unable to track consumer movements when conducting campaigns for large customers. “All the tracking tools were focused on pages and clicks,” say Knowles. “I wanted to focus on tracking people.”

In 2008, Knowles founded Kelly Street Digital, a self-funded startup company with eight employees—six of whom are developers. The company created Campaign Taxi, an application available by subscription that helps customers track consumer interactions across multiple marketing campaigns. Designed for advertising and marketing agencies, Campaign Taxi features an application programming interface (API) that customers can use to easily set up digital campaigns, add functionality to their websites, store consumer information in a single database, and present the data in reports.

Kelly Street Digital formally launched Campaign Taxi on September 1, 2010, and the company updates the product every four weeks. It has eight customers in Australia, including one government customer who uses the application to track user-generated content on its website. Among its corporate customers is an online book reseller who uses the application to plot online registrations, responses to monthly email offers, and genre preferences of buyers.

“The goal of Campaign Taxi is to follow consumers from one campaign to the next with a cost-effective solution,” says Knowles. “We build a list of all the consumers’ interactions over time, and the information is aggregated, so you can get a single, cumulative view across all consumer activity, across multiple campaigns, and measure your effectiveness.” (See Figure 1.)

When the company began developing Campaign Taxi, it ran the application with a local hosting company. It then intended to run the application in an on-premises data center. It made significant infrastructure purchases, including two instances of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 data management software and two web servers. Then Kelly Street Digital discovered Amazon Web Services and, after a few trials, it moved the application to the Amazon cloud. “We liked the idea of scalability so that as volume of customer activity grew, we could virtually add more servers,” says Knowles. “Plus, the cost of Amazon Web Services was about the same as the on-premises hardware infrastructure.”

The Campaign Taxi beta application resided on Amazon Web Services for seven months. Kelly Street Digital purchased third-party software to manage instances of Campaign Taxi in the Amazon cloud. The company secured the services of a consultant based in the United States to set up and manage the cloud environment. It also hired a consultant database administrator to help with the database servers. Says Knowles, “Not only was it expensive to hire consultants, but it was unreliable because they sometimes had conflicting priorities and they lived in different time zones.”

In December 2009, a few days before the Christmas holiday, the instance of Campaign Taxi in the Amazon cloud stopped running. The cloud consultant that Kelly Street Digital had hired to manage its environment was on vacation in Paris, France. “I couldn’t call Amazon, and they provided no support options,” says Knowles. “The best we could do was post on the developer forum. When you rely on the developer community for support, you can’t rely on them at Christmas time because they’re on holiday.”

In general, Kelly Street Digital felt it needed a faster and more reliable cloud solution. “If the Campaign Taxi API is down, our customers’ sites don’t work,” says Knowles. “If they’re relying on our application for competition entries, consumer registrations, or any other functionality, we’ve broken their site. I did not want Kelly Street Digital to be managing servers and patching software.”

Solution

In April 2010, when the Microsoft cloud-computing platform—Windows Azure—became available for technology preview, Kelly Street Digital decided to try it. It conducted a two-week pilot program with Campaign Taxi on the Windows Azure platform, which provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.

The first thing Kelly Street Digital noticed during the pilot program was that the response time of its application and API was significantly faster with Windows Azure than it was with Amazon Web Services. Based on this improved latency alone, the company decided to move Campaign Taxi to the Windows Azure platform. It estimated that the process would take six weeks, but it took one developer only three weeks to migrate the application. By June 2010, Kelly Street Digital was running the application—which was still in beta—in the Windows Azure cloud.

With the application on the Windows Azure platform, Kelly Street Digital can take advantage of familiar tools and well-established technologies, and it can deploy its application in minutes. It created Campaign Taxi by using the Microsoft .NET Framework, a software framework that supports several programming languages and is compatible with Windows Azure. The company’s developers write code in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, an integrated development environment, and collaborate by using Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, an application lifecycle management solution that is used to manage development projects with tools for source control, data collection, reporting, and project tracking. “With Windows Azure, you press a button to test the application in the stagingenvironment,” says Knowles. “Then you press another button to put the application into production in the cloud. It’s seamless.”

When Kelly Street Digital needed to rework Campaign Taxi to run on Microsoft SQL Azure—which provides database capabilities as a fully managed service—it sent its lead developer to a four-hour training through Microsoft BizSpark, a program that provides software startup companies with developer resources. The developer then wrote a script that quickly ported the application’s relational database to SQL Azure. “The migration from Microsoft SQL Server to Microsoft SQL Azure was quite straightforward because they’re very similar,” says Knowles. “You have to code around a few things, but they are basically the same application.”

When Kelly Street Digital needed another instance of the application while it was using Amazon Web Services, it had to commissiona second instance of Microsoft SQL Server and have a database consultant configure the mirroring of data. With SQL Azure, however, Kelly Street Digital can scale the application automatically in the cloud without adding more hardware. The company uses Blob storage in Windows Azure to import consumer data and temporarily store its customers’ uploaded data files. It also employs Blob storage to store backups of SQL Azure.

Although it still backs up its database locally each night to conform to best practices, Kelly Street Digital has yet to experience any data loss since migrating its application to Windows Azure. “One thing that Microsoft is really clear about is that you should always have two instances of your application in the cloud, but at first we had only one,” says Knowles. “When installing patches, we always have one instance running and available to customers in the cloud.”

Benefits

Since Kelly Street Digital moved its Campaign Taxi application to the Windows Azure platform, it benefits from significantly reduced costs, faster run time and increased speed of deployment, a familiar development environment, reliable service, and built-in scalability. “Windows Azure is an unbelievable product,” says Knowles. “I’m an evangelist for it in my network of startups. We’ve chosen this cloud platform and we’re sticking with it.”

Decreased Costs

Kelly Street Digital paid U.S.$4,970 each month for Amazon Web Services; the cost of subscribing to the Windows Azure platform is only 16 percent of that cost—$795 a month—for the same configuration. “The savings we achieved by switching to Windows Azure is just outstanding,” says Knowles, “I can use the annual cost savings to pay a developer’s salary.”

Additionally, the company no longer has to pay contractors to maintain its database or manage the Amazon Web Services environment—for an average savings of $600 a month. Kelly Street Digital staff members can now focus on improving the application. “With the Windows Azure platform, we don’t have to manage anything,” says Knowles. “We don’t have to manage the hosting environment. We don’t have to manage the databases. We just don’t have those discussions anymore. That’s a huge cost savings.”

Kelly Street Digital takes advantage of the Microsoft account tools that provide up-to-date reports on how much an organization is spending on cloud computing each month. Unlike Amazon, Microsoft offers pricing for Windows Azure in Australian dollars, so the company avoids the uncertainty of currency fluctuations that it used to experience. “The Australian dollar goes up and down like a yo-yo,” says Knowles. “If you’re a startup—especially if you’re using a scalable resource—you need to accurately predict your cash flow requirements. I have to know what it’s going to cost.”

Increased Speed

Everyone at Kelly Street Digital was surprised at how much faster the Campaign Taxi application worked on the Windows Azure platform compared to its running time on Amazon Web Services. Says Knowles, “For that kind of improved latency, we would have paid a premium to convert to the Windows Azure platform.”

The increased speed of deployment impressed the team even more. “When we used Amazon Web Services, it took a whole afternoon to deploy our application,” says Knowles. “Now we can deploy our application by using Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and it takes maybe 20 minutes.”

Tightly Integrated Technologies

Kelly Street Digital takes advantage of familiar and reliable Microsoft technologies that make it simple to sustain a rapid development cycle for Campaign Taxi. Because they’re using familiar development tools, the company’s developers can focus on enhancing the application. “The integration of Windows Azure with Microsoft development tools is brilliant,” says Knowles. “The .NET Framework development environment is remarkably mature. If you have Visual Studio, Team Foundations Server, and the cloud, you’re in business.”

Improved Reliability

Kelly Street Digital has confidence in the service level agreement and 24-hour support that comes with the Windows Azure platform. “Our business lives and dies on the reliability of our service,” says Knowles. “With the Windows Azure platform, all system administration issues are gone. We control the most important thing: our application. The cloud takes care of the rest.”

Enhanced Scalability

The company also makes use of the built-in scalability that comes with the Windows Azure platform to store ever-increasing quantities of consumer interaction data. Kelly Street Digital expects storage requirements to double each month for the next year. “With Windows Azure, we don’t have to worry about scalability because it’s automatic,” says Knowles. “Plus, I don’t have to worry about how fast the company grows. I can embrace growth because scalability is built in.”
Windows Azure Platform

The Windows Azure platform provides an excellent foundation for expanding online product and service offerings. The main components include:

• 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, and bandwidth, and a content distribution network to host, scale, and manage web applications through Microsoft data centers.
• Microsoft SQL Azure. Microsoft SQL Azure offers the first cloud-based relational and self-managed database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies.
• Windows Azure AppFabric. With Windows Azure AppFabric, developers can build and manage applications more easily both on-premises and in the cloud.

−AppFabric Service Bus connects services and applications across network boundaries to help developers build distributed applications.

−AppFabric Access Control provides federated, claims-based access control for REST web services.

• Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket. Developers and information workers can use the new service DataMarket to easily discover, purchase, and manage premium data subscriptions in the Windows Azure platform.

To learn more about the Windows Azure platform, please visit:

For more information about Microsoft BizSpark, go to: