Partners Expand Services

Portfolios, Add Technical Value

with the Windows Azure Platform
Three Case Studies for Technical Decision Makers

This white paper describes how Microsoft® system integrator partners are using
Windows Azure™, an Internet-scale cloud services platform that is hosted in
Microsoft data centers, to develop applications and services that are quick to
deploy, easy to manage, readily scalable, and competitively priced.

Because the Windows Azure platform handles the deployment and operations
infrastructure, partners can extend their reach into new markets while staying
focused on the bottom-line business value of customers’ IT investments.

November 2009

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Contents
The Windows Azure Platform ..................................................................................................................................... 3
Windows Azure for System Integrators ............................................................................................................. 3
Avanade: High-Volume Applications from Enterprise to Web ...................................................................... 4
Moving to a Distributed Processing Model...................................................................................................... 5
Design Points ............................................................................................................................................................... 5
CSC: Legal Solutions Suite ........................................................................................................................................... 6
Breaking Down the Migration Task ..................................................................................................................... 7
Experience So Far ....................................................................................................................................................... 8
Infosys: mConnect........................................................................................................................................................... 9
Putting Language Interoperability to the Test ................................................................................................ 9
Future Directions ..................................................................................................................................................... 10
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................................... 11
More Information on Windows Azure ................................................................................................................. 12
More Information on Microsoft SI Partners ....................................................................................................... 13
Avanade ...................................................................................................................................................................... 13
Computer Sciences Corporation........................................................................................................................ 13
Infosys Technologies .............................................................................................................................................. 14

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The Windows Azure Platform
The Windows Azure™ platform is an Internet-scale cloud services platform hosted
in Microsoft data centers that offers virtualized computing power, storage,
monitoring, and automated management for
applications and services.
Windows Azure is an open
Although the platform provides specific add-ins platform that adds
and tools for the Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 support for non-Microsoft
development system, Windows Azure is an open developer tools and
environment that enables developers to technologies to its solid
continue to use familiar Microsoft and non- foundation in Visual
Microsoft languages, tools, and services. Studio 2008 and the .NET
Windows Azure supports .NET, SOAP, REST, Framework.
XML, Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python, helping
developers integrate a broad variety of
applications with minimal effort.

Windows Azure for System Integrators

The Windows Azure platform provides readily scalable processing power and
storage, along with tools and services that support dynamic capacity adjustment,
load balancing, and failover, on a pay-as-you-go basis.

With Windows Azure, system integrators (SIs) have the infrastructure they need
to develop cloud-based applications and service offerings. SIs can more readily
offer their clients options for moving all or part of on-premises applications to
the Web, for extending existing applications’ functionality with new Web-based
features, and for enhancing current on-premises operations with the benefits of
software-plus-services.

Using Windows Azure, SIs can extend the scale and reach of their services
without huge capital outlay or significant increases in logistical staff. They benefit
from new consulting opportunities and associated revenue streams offered by
the cloud computing environment. SIs can concentrate on designing and building
applications and services that their clients need without committing resources to
the operational tasks involved in deploying, managing, and hosting those
services themselves.

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 The following case studies illustrate how three Microsoft system integrator
partners, Avanade, CSC, and Infosys, are using the Windows Azure platform to
expand on and streamline service offerings.

Avanade: High-Volume Applications from

Enterprise to Web
Avanade—which is majority owned by Accenture—connects insight, innovation,
and expertise with Microsoft technologies to help customers realize
results. As early adopters of Windows Azure, Avanade developers
Avanade’s solutions immediately saw the value in moving high-volume, on-premises
development team builds applications that are characterized by unpredictable surges in traffic
on the innovations and to the cloud.
best practices from their
Accenture and Avanade produce industry solutions such as online
most successful customer
banking, e-commerce, and media production. Predicting demand,
projects to engineer an
and therefore the required IT capacity for these sorts of services is
unmatched portfolio of
difficult. The tendency is to overprovision data center capacity to
proven, repeatable
support strict service level agreements (SLAs). But this leads to
solutions that help
extended periods where data center resources are idle and
customers drive results.
operations overhead is correspondingly high; in this environment,
the cost to serve can be artificially inflated. On-demand scalability
with the Windows Azure platform provides an advantage in this scenario by
offering the ability to bring additional instances of processing applications online
or take them offline as required by variability in demand. Avanade developers
demonstrated how the company’s applications for media processing, ticketing,
and publishing would benefit from the flexible scaling options available through
the Windows Azure platform.

Developers also identified another more purely logistical advantage to moving to

the cloud: They could build Windows Azure applications that were functionally
equivalent to their on-premises versions, from standardized and shared source
components. Doing so increases efficiency throughout the development, test,
and build processes. They can then migrate all or part of their applications to
Windows Azure with minimal forking of a single code base, from which they can
build both on-premises and cloud-based editions of their applications.

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Moving to a Distributed Processing Model
Avanade’s applications were primarily three-tier architectures that relied more on
multithreaded local processing than a distributed processing model. The media
processing and ticketing projects share a common requirement of applications
that Avanade plans to move to Windows Azure: They need to respond with
predictable performance and cost to unpredictable fluctuations in demand.

Developers decided on a phased migration approach to the Windows Azure

platform. Early phases would first divide application tasks into local front-end job
scheduling and remote compute-heavy processing before the tasks would be
migrated to the cloud. Subsequent phases would move more of the front-end
components into Windows Azure, along with operations and management
support such as rich-event and performance logging.

A first step was to use the Windows® Communication Foundation (WCF) to move
the processing portion of a multithreaded local processing model into
cooperative Web services that can then be readily hosted in Windows Azure.

For Avanade’s media encoding and publishing application, this meant that tasks
were handed off to the cloud, where worker roles could be brought online to
service batches of up to 20 or more encoding requests for each media stream.
For the ticketing and online reservation system, Accenture hosts the back-end
business logic locally and utilizes the Windows Azure service to handle
unpredictable surges in consumer traffic. User interface and data presentation
functions are unchanged, but services such as user authentication, data storage,
and event logging can be moved to the cloud.

Design Points
Developers at Avanade noted that services on the Windows Azure platform must
be strictly stateless—meaning that the distributed processing features of
Windows Azure services cannot maintain state across requests. This required
some changes to the stateful on-premises model, but it is a common
requirement for Web services and a best-practice for developing WCF
applications.

Moving to a cloud-based infrastructure such as Windows Azure is seldom an all-

or-nothing process. Avanade’s experience is that software-plus-services
applications, in which portions of the application remain on-premises while

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(typically) compute-intensive or resource-intensive functions are moved to the
cloud, often make the most sense. Part of the design process is finding the
balance point that makes most logistical and economic sense for the specific
application and its customer deployment.

A further consideration was operations. Customers are used to monitoring

applications from their on-premises operations consoles, where they now need to
see the performance of their cloud-based services. Developers plan to integrate
performance data from Windows Azure into local operations functions so that
customers can more easily maintain a holistic view of their IT investments.

Avanade is developing dedicated Windows Azure skills now while also identifying
common patterns and practices that will speed clients’ future adoption of services
built on the Window Azure platform.

CSC: Legal Solutions Suite

CSC provides a mature suite of applications for the legal and claims industries
including Legal Solutions Suite (LSS). Currently hosted onsite at customer
locations or in CSC data centers, Legal Solutions Suite is poised to offer a
business service based on the Windows Azure
platform. CSC’s Legal Solutions Suite
is used by 50 enterprises
A key consideration for CSC in developing an
and more than 6000 law
application for Windows Azure was expanding
firms to help simplify the
its corporate services penetration in both
billing process, analyze
domestic and international markets. The
legal expenses, document
expanding network of Microsoft data centers
performance, and provide
offers greater potential for global reach with
a collaborative workspace.
applications and services written for Windows
Azure and for isolation from scalability issues as demand grows. CSC anticipates
significantly reducing the lead time required to provision the solution, thus
accelerating time to production. And by using the Windows Azure platform, CSC
will be able to increase capacity almost instantaneously. Alongside the added
capacity, the Windows Azure platform provides high availability through
automated load balancing and redundancy—important features that are costly to

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 deploy and manage in-house or as options from a conventional hosting service
provider.

CSC developers were already familiar with Microsoft development tools and the
Microsoft .NET Framework; the existing LSS application is built on the .NET
Framework version 3.5, so portions of the code could be easily ported to the
Windows Azure platform. Other components needed to be
redesigned to take advantage of the functional division
Local applications now between Web roles and worker roles in Windows Azure.
behave more like job
schedulers, handing off Breaking Down the Migration Task
compute-intensive tasks to LSS comprises three major components that handle Web
cloud-based worker server, data access and consolidation, and data processing
services hosted on the functions.
virtual machines in the
For the Windows Azure deployment, LSS developers created
Windows Azure platform
two Web roles to handle HTTPS communications and
and brought online and
business logic, and one worker role to perform
offline as needed.
asynchronous processing and data storage and retrieval
tasks. The number of instances of concurrent roles can then
be increased or decreased to meet current capacity
requirements.

For the initial release to the Windows Azure platform, CSC developers decided to
implement core features of the current version of LSS. However, some LSS
features are planned for a subsequent release, such as those that interface with
external components, including CSC’s claims management system for the self-
insured market, Riskmaster X, and Data Exchange Web service. When migrated,
these external components will implement WCF interfaces, which can be readily
deployed in Windows Azure.

Some additional design changes needed to be made to their application to

prepare existing functionality for deployment on the Windows Azure platform.

Windows Azure’s stateless model means that cached data can no longer be
stored in memory because it may be serviced by multiple instances of an LSS role.
Instead, data is written to Windows Azure storage—a slight trade-off in

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performance compared with local on-premises storage that buys a big advantage
in scalability and availability.

For event and error reporting, LSS

components must now use Windows Azure
agents. Local system files and event logs are CSC believes that moving
no longer available in the virtualized to Windows Azure will give
Windows Azure environment. it a significant competitive
advantage with its Legal
To keep LSS e-mail alerts running in Windows Solutions Services product.
Azure, which does not offer an SMTP service,
LSS developers routed messages through
port 25 to use an external SMTP relay.

To help optimize performance, developers decided to take advantage of ―affinity

groups‖ in Windows Azure. Affinity groups help achieve high bandwidth and low
latency by specifying not only the geographic location of the hosted services but
also collocation for services and their related data storage.

Experience So Far
CSC developers took advantage of Windows Azure tools for building, debugging,
and deploying to Windows Azure directly from their existing development
environment. As a result, developers were comfortable with an aggressive
schedule that enabled them to design, develop, test, and publish a solution
hosted on Windows Azure within their normal annual product release cycle. In
addition, the LSS transformation to the cloud used CSC’s existing software-as-a-
service business and technical framework to accelerate overall project timelines.

CSC has made a considerable investment in cloud services, including the creation
of an Azure Competency Center for Windows Azure Development. The company
is preparing LSS for production in its competency center in Vietnam, and
anticipates further expansion in Asia and to the United Kingdom. CSC expects to
offer more of its financial services applications on the Windows Azure platform in
the future.

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 Infosys: mConnect
Infosys offers mConnect, a product that enables Web sites, e-commerce, and
banking platforms to support mobile devices without costly modifications to their
services. Infosys mConnect middleware abstracts the variety and complexity of
current and future mobile devices, identifies device and network capabilities, and
presents requested data to users in the most appropriate and effective way.
mConnect overcomes major challenges to the distribution of content on mobile
devices, isolating content provisioning from the diversity of devices, browsers,
mobile applications, and network technologies. And mConnect is fully extensible,
so that support for new application capabilities and devices can be brought
online quickly and efficiently.

For Web sites and e-commerce providers, the value is simple: a device-agnostic
process of building applications that offers a standardized context regardless of
how data is ultimately presented and consumed.

mConnect is a successful on-premises product. In order to best offer mConnect

in a hosted, multitenant environment, Infosys decided to take advantage of the
pay-by-use model offered by Windows Azure. Windows Azure provides increased
scalability and improved performance without high upfront investment, helping
mConnect efficiently meet the huge demand of business-to-consumer mobility
services. The Windows Azure platform handles computation and Web-facing
workloads, while Microsoft SQL Azure™ provides data storage, simplifying
provisioning and deployment of databases that benefit
from enterprise-class availability and built-in data
mConnect from Infosys
protection.
provides a rich customer
experience, rapid support Putting Language Interoperability to the Test
for new devices and mConnect’s platform was originally built on a J2EE
services, and can be platform and can work with almost all relational databases
integrated with any for data storage. An attractive benefit of the move to
existing back-end Windows Azure was the increase in scalability gained by
application. utilizing SQL Azure while maintaining the application’s
existing relational data handling functions. One of the key

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implementation objectives was to accomplish
“With Windows Azure, you
the migration to Windows Azure in weeks rather
really don't have to go
than months and to avoid rewriting large parts
outside and ask for
of the application, which were already well
infrastructure; therefore
tested.
your ability to deliver
Migrating the data repository to SQL Azure was solutions becomes much
straight forward: Developers used Microsoft SQL faster. You can really
Server® Integration Services tools to help build innovate and be
packages that would migrate data from on- competitive.”
premises databases to SQL Azure. But the Java-
—Sidharth Ghag, Senior
based application components required more Architect, Infosys
thought because they could not be hosted
directly as a service in Windows Azure.

Interoperability, though, is key to Windows Azure, and Java-based applications

and services can interoperate with components of the .NET Framework in
Windows Azure as long as they do not require elevated privileges (such as are
required to write directly to the registry or to access system folders). Infosys
developers created a specialized Windows Azure worker role under the .NET
Framework for the service endpoints; at service startup, the worker role deploys
and configures the required J2EE Web server and infrastructure and then deploys
the mConnect package above it to start the mConnect engine. Because the
application was already using the Java runtime in the Azure worker role, no
changes were required to the application code itself. By adopting this least-
invasive approach to application migration, Infosys was able to run a Java-based
package deployed and served from the Windows Azure platform. Thus, the
company gained the required scalability and reliability it needed from the
platform along with an overall fast time-to-market.

Future Directions
The Infosys mConnect experience is an example of a relatively straightforward
migration of a legacy application to cloud-based services. Developers are
confident that they can deploy any of their Java-based application packages in
Windows Azure with minimal changes and few, now well-understood, new
components.

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 Infosys is looking at other creative ways to add the value of
its Windows Azure–based mConnect service to existing on-
Windows Azure supports premises applications such as Interactive Voice Response and
xcopy deployment for IP-based television. The scalability and ubiquity of Windows
applications that require Azure applications is a natural fit for mConnect’s
otherwise unsupported multichannel, multiple-device capabilities.
runtime components.
But there are also scenarios where on-premises applications
that use the .NET Framework can make some or all of their
functionality available to Windows Azure by exploiting the
interoperability WCF. For the future, Infosys sees a productive interaction
between cloud-based and on-premises applications as they take advantage of
the commonality between local and Web-based programming and deployment
environments. Customers could be offered the ability to run almost any
application both on-premises and as a service published to Windows Azure,
depending on their current business requirements.

Conclusion
A common thread among the experiences of these Microsoft SI partners is that
Windows Azure solutions are a key addition to their services portfolio, enabling
them to offer their clients a broad range of options for taking advantage of
cloud-based services.

Windows Azure is a flexible environment, offering SIs a great response to

customer scenarios that can take advantage of the scalability and the cost-
effectiveness of moving all or part of the solution to the Web. In some cases, key
functionality can be migrated to a cloud-based service, while the bulk of the
application remains on-premises. The windows Azure architecture also enables
complete applications to be recast as services, removing the requirement for on-
premises equipment and operations.

Development is supported by a rapidly maturing tool set, based on familiar

Microsoft programming environments and a comprehensive SDK. A base level of
support for non-Microsoft software and runtime environments is enhanced by a
growing amount of community experience in migrating diverse deployment
configurations to the Windows Azure platform.

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Development is in most cases straightforward, and time-to-market for solutions
based on Windows Azure is short—all the partners in this white paper claim that
the cloud-based editions of their applications could easily be developed within
their normal version publication cycle.

More Information on Windows Azure

Visit the following Web sites for more information on Windows Azure.

Windows Azure on Microsoft.com

Windows Azure for Web Developers
Windows Azure Developer Forums
Windows Azure Developer SDKs
Example of hosting WCF Services in Windows Azure
White paper: Securing Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure
White paper: Security Features in Microsoft Online Services

More information on interoperability with otherwise unsupported programming

environments in Windows Azure is offered by Microsoft’s Steve Marx in his blog.

For 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, visit:
www.microsoft.com

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More Information on Microsoft SI Partners
The following sections offer additional information on the Microsoft SI partners
discussed in this white paper.

Avanade
Avanade provides business technology services that connect insight, innovation,
and expertise in Microsoft technologies to help customers realize results.
Avanade’s services help improve performance, productivity, and sales for
organizations in all industries, and put power in the hands of the people who
need it most: employees.

Avanade’s approach can bring clarity to the most complex business and
technology challenges, resulting in faster returns on investment at lower cost and
with less risk.

Avanade’s focus on one technology means customers receive unsurpassed

expertise in Microsoft technologies. This specialty allows us to invest in tools and
methodologies that extend the value of Microsoft products and accelerate
delivery of reliable solutions customized to meet specific needs.

Each project brings the right skills—whether onshore, offshore, nearshore, or a

mix—with consultants who are connected 24 hours a day across our global
network to bring forward the best innovations and solutions.

Avanade’s unique connections to Accenture and Microsoft provide a powerful

combination of business, industry, and technology insights that help customers
realize business success.

Avanade solutions and services information is available at www.avanade.com.

Contact us at information@avanade.com.

Computer Sciences Corporation

CSC, one of the world’s leading consulting and IT services firms, helps clients in
industry and government achieve strategic and operational results through the
use of technology. The company’s success is based on its culture of working
collaboratively with clients to develop innovative technology strategies and
solutions that address specific business challenges. Having guided clients
through every major wave of change in information technology since 1959, CSC

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combines the newest technologies with its capabilities in consulting, systems
design and integration, IT and business process outsourcing, applications
software, and Web and application hosting to meet the individual needs of global
corporations and organizations.

CSC distinguishes itself through its time-tested ability to plan, build, and operate
highly reliable, efficient, and secure business and IT solutions for leading financial
services firms around the world. To complement its capabilities in consulting,
systems integration, and outsourcing, CSC brings financial services industry
knowledge and experience, a comprehensive portfolio of financial services
application software, and an extensive network of industry and technology
partners. More than 10,000 CSC employees are dedicated to serving financial
services clients, including more than 1,200 major banks, insurers, and investment
management and securities firms.

CSC Legal Solutions information is available at (800) 345-7672, or visit the Web
site at:
www.csc.com/legal_solutions

Infosys Technologies
Infosys defines, designs, and delivers technology-enabled business solutions that
help Global 2000 companies win in a Flat World. Infosys also provides a complete
range of services by leveraging domain and business expertise and strategic
alliances with leading technology providers.

Infosys's offerings span business and technology consulting, application services,

systems integration, product engineering, custom software development,
maintenance, re-engineering, independent testing and validation services, IT
infrastructure services, and business process outsourcing

Infosys pioneered the Global Delivery Model (GDM), which emerged as a

disruptive force in the industry that led to the rise of offshore outsourcing. The
GDM is based on the principle of taking work to the location where the best
talent is available, where it makes the best economic sense, with the least amount
of acceptable risk.

Infosys has a global footprint with over 50 offices and development centers in
India, China, Australia, the Czech Republic, Poland, the United Kingdom, Canada,

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and Japan. Infosys and its subsidiaries have 103,905 employees as of June 30,
2009.

Infosys Technologies products and services information is available at (510)

742-3000, or visit the Web site at:
www.infosys.com

Copyright
This is a preliminary document and may be changed substantially prior to final commercial release of the software
described herein.

The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues
discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not
be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any
information presented after the date of publication.

This white paper is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR
STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT.

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© 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Microsoft, Azure, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Windows, Windows Azure, and Windows Server are trademarks of the
Microsoft group of companies.

All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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