The implications and characteristics of the Associated Press

Associated Press (AP), the world's largest news agency and a worldwide news provider, created a new content channel through managed services. It has 243 offices in 97 countries and 4,100 staff worldwide. Day and night for newspapers, radio, television and the Internet to provide the latest and most real-time news information, on average, half of the world's news daily from the AP.

To broaden its reach, the AP simplifies the solution by encouraging developers to integrate AP content into their applications and creating highly scalable solutions by using Microsoft-hosted Windows Azuretm platforms. Create new business opportunities for themselves.

Business requirements:

Associated Press (AP) provides the latest and most real-time news information for newspapers, radio, television and the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is the world's largest and oldest news organization with 243 offices in 97 countries and 4,100 staff worldwide. AP for the United States 1700 newspapers, 5,000 broadcast media, as well as 550 international broadcasting services. AP is a non-profit cooperative, shared by members of the United States daily. It maintains a digital image archive of over 10 million images.

To find potential sources of revenue, and to seek new customers, the AP began to plan to implement a highly scalable API, and developers around the world could integrate AP news content into their applications. The AP team is eager to understand what developers are willing to do with their new jobs. (It is called the Associated Press breaking News API)

"Part of the task of the project is to see what news people are interested in." "said Alan Wintroub, AP Enterprise Application services development director. "We want to use the developer's ecosystem, and its dynamism and creativity." We see that this will be a winning situation. "

Scale planning is the best place to highlight the advantages of the Microsoft cloud model, and the Windows Azure platform frees us from those annoyances, while other platforms cannot do it--jonathan Malek, Associated Press chief architect and research director

By using APIs to deliver content, the AP initially considered a non cloud solution. But IT staff are more focused on upfront investments in hardware and software, as well as the potential impact on existing services and systems. So the agency starts looking for alternatives to the project.