H.E.T software uses Windows Azure to cut costs by 50%

As part of the real World Windows Azure series, I contacted H.E.T, the sales director of software, Paul Patarou, to learn about how the company rebuilt its field survey application on Windows Azure to reduce customer IT overhead, Accelerate time-to-market and scale to accommodate large amounts of data. Read H.E.T's success story here. Here's what the conversation is about.

Himanshu Kumar Singh: Talk about h.e.t. Software.

Paul patarou:h.e.t. Software develops professional solutions for social service providers in the UK and Australia. Based in Heverill, near Cambridge, we are the industry leader with 550 customers who provide home care, residential and nursing homes and life services.

HKS: Where does the idea of doing this field survey application originate?

PP: We have the excellent knowledge of social care customers and evolving our solutions to meet their needs. We recognize that it is expensive for these organizations to record care and support access to thousands of contract details. For example, processing schedules and claim forms, and creating timesheets can take many hours of administrative time. The ability to gather information on the ground and efficiently deliver quality services is critical.

As mobile devices play an increasingly important role in medical services in the 2008, we see an opportunity to expand our services. There are 7,000 home care providers in the UK, but until recently there were applications that supported caregivers in capturing real-time web information. Our customers rely on staff to fill out the worksheets and then process them in the office. Government authorities and labor costs have become a big concern for our clients.

HKS: So you develop this field worker solution. How does it work?

PP: We are rapidly developing to meet these challenges. The solution has been successful, but we need a large peak service hosting platform that can cope with the 7-day-A-week, 24-hour transmission every day. We realize that our platform will not be expanded because we need it. Our customers must record access to all the data because they need to show it to the government agency for medical funding. Millions of transactions are carried out every day and tend to peak at some point. For example, caregivers will perform more visits during breakfast, lunch and dinner hours, so they capture more data during these periods.

HKS: Tell me about Caremanagermobile.

Pp:caremanagermobile is an application that provides mobile device services through Windows Azure. Secure Web applications can access multiple smartphone platforms through HTML5 browsers. It uses GPS-based tracking records to access information in real time, including time to arrival and departure. When the caregiver arrives at the service user's location, confirm that access and tasks are automatically updated. New schedules and requests can be sent to mobile services, while the details of the care invoices are recorded by the provider and funding agencies.

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

PP: With Windowsazure, the development team can cost-effectively test the new version, because physical provisioning or configuration is not required. Windows Azure provides powerful staging, deployment, and management capabilities. In addition, we have expanded by storage requirements, as well as security and service continuity.

HKS: What are the benefits to customers?

PP: With Windows Azure Caremanagermobile can scale quickly to meet customer data requirements and applications, resources are allocated cost-effectively through dedicated web and worker roles. Network Load Balancing is automatically managed to provide continuous availability, and customers are protected by availability service-level agreements for 99.95% uptime.

We charge the Caremanagermobile by annual subscription, per user so that we can scale the application according to the amount of data. In this way, our customers can significantly reduce the operation and maintenance of their IT costs while allowing them to scale out without performance problems.

Hks:windows Azure to h.e.t. What are the benefits of the software business?

PP: Our solution is used in the UK in the potential market around 9%. In the 2012 marketing promotion strategy, we forecast the number of customers using Caremanagermobile will grow rapidly. Our scalable performance management extensions do not have to take into account new staff or resource factors.

In addition, Windows Azure features allow us to develop our own software services that we cannot provide. For example, we can configure the test solution in minutes. This helps us to provide competitive products and quickly release new versions to the market. Furthermore the nursing was strengthened. In the past we had no data to carry out the effective planning resources we wanted. Now, if a customer asks the caregiver to do extra work that will lead to longer than the assigned task, we can let the next person know. And, if it happens to be a particular customer, we know we need to allocate more time to that customer in the future.

HKS: What are your future plans with Windows Azure?

PP: We plan to start combining our entire care solution portfolio into Windows Azure in 2012. The benefits of extending the cost and performance of Windows Azure for our customers are significant to us.