IT companies improve their flagship offerings and provide cloud solutions for more customers

As part of the real World Windows Azure series, we contacted management partner Oguz Kucukbarak in ODC to learn more about how IT companies can use Windows Azure to improve their flagship products and provide services to more customers. Read the ODC success story here. Know what he's going to say.

Himanshu Kumar Singh: Tell me something about ODC.

Oguz KUCUKBARAK:ODC, founded in Istanbul, Turkey, is an IT business and technology consultancy with more than 50 employees. Founded in 2005, ODC has Smartmessage and Smartmessage On-demand, which has more than 800 corporate customers in many industries, including banking, insurance, automobiles, and telecommunications.

HKS:ODC How to provide service?

Ok:smartmessage and Smartmessage On-demand are e-commerce and activity management platforms where companies can contact customers and employees through mass distribution of mail and short message Service (SMS) information and other electronic forms. Smartmessage is synchronized with the customer database and can easily identify activities based on age, occupation, or location criteria. Smartmessage is a non cloud solution that runs on customers ' hardware, while Smartmessage On-demand hosted on ODC servers without requiring customers to invest in infrastructure.

HKS: What makes you evaluate cloud services as a possible solution?

OK: Although ODC has successfully given customers existing products, we still face the challenges from the SME customers, this is a strong new market. For these customers, investing in hardware to host smartmessage deployments on a non cloud level is expensive and may not require advanced features of the product.

Smartmessage On-demand is an alternative to these customers, but the rapid growth of the product almost depletes the ODC hosting infrastructure. SMS messages over 20 million per month are sent through Smartmessage On-demand. In the days of peak usage, it becomes very difficult to extend our hardware to meet requirements levels and service-level agreements. So we started looking for small and medium business customers, and a more flexible and scalable solution.

HKS: How did you decide on Windows Azure?

OK: Given the viability of cloud solutions for high scalability and cost-saving enterprise-class applications, ODC believes that cloud solutions may be a perfect match for a new version of the company's smartmessage. Specifically, ODC takes into account windows
Azure. We have cooperated with Microsoft since the company was founded. Therefore, we believe that Windows Azure will fully conform to our product development strategy. Windows Azure allows us to dynamically adjust our resources, which makes it easier to accommodate our peak requirements and eliminates the need for additional infrastructure costs.

HKS: How do I migrate to Windows Azure?

OK: In early 2012, three developers ' teams started working on the new product Smartmessage Lite. Because developers have experience with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Development Systems, the transition to Windows Azure is smooth. Our developers also find it easy to access useful resources at development time. We are able to find answers to MSDN and have strong support from the local Microsoft team. And there is an increasing online Windows Azure developer community where we can find answers to any questions we encounter.

HKS: What benefits do you experience with Windows Azure running?

OK: With the exception of Windows Azure, which makes Smartmessage lite more scalable, the development team makes products easier to use so that it is more suitable for SME customers. The original Smartmessage Lite version includes a simplified user interface and SMS distribution of core functionality. The second phase of the product, now scheduled for the end of 2012, will add the email functionality.

The development of Smartmessage Lite only took three months; Windows Azure Storage makes us very impressive, and it easily stores large amounts of data. We also found that the Windows Azure emulator is helpful for testing the new version locally before migrating to the cloud. The dynamic scalability of Windows Azure means that we can spend less time worrying about resource allocations and spending more time improving product performance.

HKS: What are the benefits to customers?

OK: Being able to meet extreme peak requirements is a key part of the Smartmessage Lite. We are now able to give customers a more usable product, a better experience, and reduce our own costs.