Microsoft Cloud Computing: Scott Caulk, vice president of the interview IdV solution

As part of the real World Windows Azure interview series, I interviewed IdV FX, Vice general manager of product management, about how the company used Windows Azure. Here is the interview content.

Himanshu Kumar Singh: Please give us a brief introduction to the IDV solution.

Scott Caulk: We provide business intelligence, security, and risk visualization solutions for large organizations. Our flagship visual fusion is a business intelligence software solution that helps companies combine the content of virtually all data sources and provide visual, interactive content to end users for better business insights. Visual Fusion and other products help us build a strong business in the Government's major organizations and private industry, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the United States Ministry of Transportation, Pfizer, Pacific Hydro, BP and Thomson Reuters Foundation.

HKS: What makes you develop fetch! on Windows Azure?

SC:2010 year, a client asked us for an application that would allow their mobile employees to access the organization's large data. We create prototypes that work very well and customers like it. The application was first fully deployed to the client's server and the end-user accessed it by mobile e-mail; However, our development team agreed that a more interactive user experience was necessary. To create a more interactive version that preserves device compatibility, we build it as a rich Web application.

We find that the solution is exposed to the Internet when it is running in the enterprise infrastructure, which leads to potential risks. We also figured out how to sell it to other customers, but realized it was concerned about data security issues and ports in the open firewall, so mobile devices could use the Internet to access internal data.

So we started looking for a basic feature that could help provide data access to mobile users while minimizing the risk of exposing public data. We chose Windows Azure as the cloud computing platform and developed applications on it. fetch! is a hybrid solution that uses cloud computing capabilities to connect mobile users with non cloud enterprise data. As a platform-independent mobile application, fetch! supports the broadest range of common mobile operating systems, including Windows Phone, Android, and IOS, as well as sending and receiving e-mail on any device.

what function does hks:fetch! have?

sc:fetch! Allows mobile company employees access to a wide range of information such as data grids and text, charts and graphs, documents and images, scorecards, and maps. It supports Visual Fusion such as IdV FX; Microsoft SharePoint and its associated PerformancePoint Services; Microsoft SQL Server database; Oracle database; Salesforce.com; and a customized line-of-business system and Web services full access.

HKS: What are the factors that made you choose Windows Azure?

SC: We are a member of the Microsoft Partner Network and have expertise in Windows development tools such as the. NET Framework, the Microsoft Visual Studio development system, and asp.net. This experience makes Windows Azure an advantage in our assessment process. The tight integration of Windows Azure and our existing development environment make our development more successful.

Windows Azure also provides one of the most valuable features of the development cycle: Windows Azure Service Bus. Service Bus provides a widely available infrastructure that is managed, secure, and provides secure messaging and communication relay capabilities. It provides connectivity options for service endpoints that are difficult or impossible to implement in other cloud computing solutions. Service Bus relay Services also eliminates the need to set up a new connection for each instance of the communication, providing faster and more reliable connectivity for mobile users.

Using Windows Azure we use. NET basics quickly add to the project, quickly expand, and then deploy a robust application, whether for smartphones or tablet devices. It was quickly deployed and fetch! was quickly revised. If we are on a non-Microsoft cloud computing platform, the deployment process may be delayed, not months or weeks.

How does hks:fetch! work?

SC: When accessing data through fetch!, mobile employees log in with email addresses and passwords, and Web applications provide a variety of ways to request data. After the user enters a command to query the data, it processes the directive in Windows Azure and sends it through Windows Azure Service bus to services running in the company's non-cloud IT infrastructure. Non-cloud services use "connectors", which is part of the fetch! solution to connect to a variety of data resources. The user whose data is collected and returned using the Web service to format and render. The speed of processing depends on the specific IT infrastructure, but it usually takes only a few seconds.

Other platform components used in this solution include Windows Azure Storage (which provides extensible and easily accessible data storage services) and Windows Azure Compute (which allows us to run application code in the cloud). Each Windows Azure compute instance runs as a virtual machine, independent of other Windows Azure customers and handles failover activities such as Network Load balancing and continuous availability. In addition fetch! can be connected to data hosted in SQL Azure.

HKS: What are the advantages of using Windows Azure for fetch!?

SC: By using Windows Azure as a major part of fetch!, we are able to use features that mitigate the security concerns of enterprise customers accessing data from mobile devices. With Windows Azure Service Bus, our customers can run fetch! services in their infrastructure without having to poke holes in the firewall to pass data in or out. This is especially important for customers in the security field, whose data security is critical. With service bus, our customers ' mobile users can connect to rich enterprise information without having to worry about exposing any security problems that the network poses.

HKS: What are the benefits of using Windows Azure for your business?

SC: When developing fetch!, we are not sure how many customers there will be, including the possibility of adding thousands of customers over a period of time. Windows Azure provides scalability to rapidly increase the number of users because the product is accepted by an increasing number of customer groups.

In addition, because of their large amount of data, corporate customers in our target market can lead to traffic spikes-sometimes adding entire groups or whole departments overnight. This means that fetch! needs to run on the cloud platform, providing a moment of tremendous scalability. This is the biggest advantage of Windows Azure. With tens of thousands of users, we can click a button to move from two load balanced Web services to more than 10 or more services in a matter of minutes, a very powerful feature for us and our customers.

We also benefit from end-to-end development tools that provide a seamless environment for innovation and upgrades. Windows Azure plays a key role in helping our company build and deliver a mobile, data access application that meets the security and scalability needs of our customers.