Real-World Windows Azure:davide Bedin about Akite Retail management solutions

As part of the real world Windows Http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13357.html ">azure series, I and Dedin Store Systems chief Technology officer Davide Bedin talked about the company's long-term strategy for a Akite retail management solution based on Windows Azure Publishing. Here's what he said:

David Ingham: Tell us about your company and the Akite services you provide to your customers?

Davide Bedin:bedin Store System, headquartered in Cornuda, Italy, Treviso, has over 20 years of development point of Sale (POS) and for retailers in-store systems experience. We have gained the credibility of the international pioneer in the use of Microsoft technology for small-scale to large-scale retailers, independent stores, chain stores to provide solutions.

Akite is a point of sale and store software designed to be a software, a service solution, on Windows Azure. Hosted on Windows Azure, Akite Retail Web services can save and analyze data by connecting to Headquarters and other external Web service stores.

Two smart client applications, pos.net for foreground storage operations, shop.net for back office tasks. Work is disconnected and cooperative in a peer-to-peer manner, which is a key advantage of being a server that is often underutilized and becomes a fault point and unnecessary energy consumption.

Akite removes its complexity from the store, making life easier for retailers. When there is no capital investment is also necessary and one-to-one charges, Akite also provides economic benefits. Deployment is simple------in a few minutes, ClickOnce allows a bad computer to be replaced or to open a new storage installation.

DI: What are the main challenges you are trying to solve using a messaging architecture?

DB: The first challenge is to synchronize data between smart clients and sales Web services that are hosted on Windows Azure. A real example of an update to the price list is an event notification that needs to be from a Web service to a smart client. This is not difficult on a small scale, but Akite supports a large number of mid-sized chains and a number of very large stores, so the aggregation task of distributing such notifications is a real challenge. Akite provides a retailer's ability to prepare for such updates in advance, but still requires the fastest possible update to the client. There is also a retailer that needs to be updated but involves hundreds of stores. The traditional solution is to have customers do intensive polling updates. The obvious disadvantage of this technique is that it consumes resources on the Web service. Windows Azure Service Bus is more appropriate to provide an efficient push to customers and allow applications to focus on their core work.

After gaining the experience of using service bus for synchronization, we learn more about its elegance and potential. We see that it can greatly help make up for asynchronous messaging between components of the Akite Retail Web service: The goal here is to find a solution to reduce storage information database loading, as well as improve resilience and reliability.