Microsoft Cloud ServicesPartner Solution Case Study

Software Firm Tackles the Huge, Mobile Data Access Market with Hybrid Cloud Solution

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Professional services—IT services

Partner ProfileIDV Solutions is a Lansing, Michigan-based software company providing Global 2000 companies and other organizations with business intelligence, security, and risk visualization solutions.

Business SituationIDV Solutions needed a scalable and cost-effective cloud platform to launch a new mobile data access solution.

SolutionThe firm turned to Windows Azure to create Fetch!, an application that helps mobile users access rich data sources, including line-of-business applications and databases.

Benefits Enhances security of mobile data

access Provides scalable platform for

company’s growth Delivers seamless environment for

developers

“Windows Azure was key in helping our company build and deliver a mobile data access app that meets the security and scalability needs of our large customers.”

Scott Caulk, Vice President of Product Management, IDV Solutions

IDV Solutions, a software company that provides large organizations with business intelligence, security, and risk visualization solutions, had an exciting market opportunity with a new product requested by one of its customers: an application that could give mobile users access to rich corporate data without compromising enterprise security. IDV Solutions turned to Windows Azure and created a hybrid solution called Fetch! that uses cloud-based components to connect mobile users with on-premises data such as analytics and dashboards, line-of-business systems, and corporate databases. With Windows Azure, the company was able to build a reliable communications infrastructure between mobile devices and corporate networks that delivers fast information exchanges while minimizing the risk to data security.

SituationIDV Solutions is a Michigan-based software company. Its flagship product, Visual Fusion, is a business intelligence software solution that helps organizations unite content from virtually any data source and then deliver it to end users in a visual, interactive context for better business insights. Visual Fusion and the company’s other products have helped IDV Solutions establish a strong presence among major organizations in government and private industry sectors, including the U.S. Depart-ment of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Transportation, Pfizer, Pacific Hydro, BP, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In 2010, one IDV Solutions customer approached the company to request an application that would make it easy for the organization’s mobile employees to access the organization’s large data collection.

“The prototype turned out to work really well, and the customer liked it,” says Scott Caulk, Vice President of Product Manage-ment for IDV Solutions.

The application was first deployed entirely on the customer’s servers and was accessed by end users though mobile email; how-ever, the development team decided that a more interactive experience was necessary. To create a more interactive version that maintained device compatibility, IDV Solutions built it as a rich web application.

“What we discovered is that getting the solution to run in an enterprise infrastruc-ture but also exposing it to the Internet began to create risks,” Caulk says. “We had the foundation of a good idea that could

be marketed to other customers as well, but realized that IT departments would worry about data security issues and opening up ports in their firewalls so mobile devices could use the Internet to access internal data.”

IDV Solutions began looking for a cloud platform that could help provide the essential functionality of providing data access to mobile users while minimizing the exposure risk for corporate data.

SolutionIDV Solutions chose Windows Azure as the cloud platform on which to develop its app. Called Fetch!, the app is a hybrid solution that uses cloud capabilities to link mobile users with on-premises enterprise data. As a platform-agnostic mobile app, Fetch! supports the broadest range of common mobile operating systems, including Windows Phone, Android, and iOS, as well as any device capable of sending and receiving email.

Fetch! allows mobile corporate employees to access a wide range of information such as data grids and text, charts and graphs, documents and images, scorecards, and maps. It supports full access to systems such as IDV Solutions Visual Fusion; Microsoft SharePoint technologies and related PerformancePoint services; Microsoft SQL Server databases; Oracle databases; Salesforce.com; and custom line-of-business systems and web services.

IDV Solutions, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, has expertise with Windows development tools such as the .NET Framework, the Microsoft Visual Studio development system, and ASP.NET.

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“We had the foundation of a good idea ... but realized that IT departments would worry about data security issues and opening up ports in their firewalls so mobile devices could use the Internet to access internal data."

Scott Caulk, Vice President of Product Management, IDV Solutions

“This [experience] gave Windows Azure an advantage in our evaluation process. The tight integration of Windows Azure with our existing development environment made our development efforts go more smoothly,” says Daniel Briggs, Senior Software Developer for IDV Solutions.

Windows Azure also provided a key feature that was invaluable during the develop-ment cycle: the Windows Azure Service Bus. The Service Bus provides a hosted, secure, and widely available infrastructure for secure messaging and communications relay capabilities. It offers connectivity options for service endpoints that in other cloud solutions would be difficult or impossible to reach. This functionality enables applications hosted on Windows Azure to securely communicate with private cloud applications hosted in a company’s data center behind a firewall. The Service Bus relay service also eliminates the need to set up a new connection for each communications instance, resulting in faster

and more reliable connections for mobile users.

When accessing data through Fetch!, mobile employees use an email address and password to log on, and a web application provides the means for requesting data. After the user enters a command to query data, the command is processed in Windows Azure and then sent via the Windows Azure Service Bus to a service running within the corporation’s on-premises IT infrastructure. The on-premises service uses “connectors” that are part of the Fetch! solution to link to variety of data sources. The relevant data is collected and then returned using a web service, which formats it and presents it to the user. “The speed of the process depends on the particular IT infrastructure,” says Briggs, “but it typically occurs in just a few seconds.”

Other platform components used in the solution include Windows Azure Storage, which provides scalable and easily accessible data storage services, and Windows Azure Compute, which lets IDV Solutions run application code in the cloud. Each Windows Azure Compute instance runs as a virtual machine that is isolated from other Windows Azure customers and handles activities such as network load balancing and failover for continuous availability. Additionally, Fetch! can connect to data hosted in a Microsoft SQL Azure cloud database.

BenefitsBy using Windows Azure as an integral part of its Fetch! solution, IDV Solutions was able to use features that ease enterprise customers’ concerns about the security of

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Fetch! lets mobile users access rich enterprise information such as security systems, asset management, and supply chain data.

data accessed from mobile devices. In addition, Windows Azure delivers a highly scalable platform that IDV Solutions believes will help it increase market adoption of Fetch! The company also benefits from end-to-end development tools that provide a seamless environment for innovations and upgrades. “Windows Azure was key in helping our company build and deliver a mobile, data access app that meets the security and scalability needs of our large customers,” says Caulk.

Enhances Data Security for Mobile UsageThe functionality of the Windows Azure Service Bus was a critical component in making Fetch! a viable solution for mobile access to enterprise data—and for over-coming a major obstacle in the widespread adoption of the application.

“With Service Bus, our customers can have the Fetch! service running inside their infrastructure without the need to poke holes in their firewall to get data in and out. This is especially important for customers in security fields, where the safety of data is critical,” Briggs explains. “With Service Bus, our customers’ mobile users can connect to rich enterprise information without exposing the network to any additional security concerns.”

Provides Highly Scalable Platform for GrowthWhen developing Fetch!, IDV Solutions wasn’t sure if it would have just a few customers or many, including large customers that might add thousands of users at a time to the solution. “Windows Azure gives us the scalability to very quickly add large volumes of users as the product

is adopted across more and more of our customer base,” Caulk says.

Furthermore, due to their large size, the enterprise customers in IDV Solutions’ target markets can cause sharp spikes in traffic—sometimes overnight in cases where they add entire groups or departments. This means that Fetch! needs to run on a cloud platform that can deliver enormous scalability at a moment’s notice.

“That’s one of the big benefits of Windows Azure,” says Caulk. “We have customers with tens of thousands of users, and we can click a button to go from having two load-balanced web servers to having a dozen or more in a matter of minutes is a very powerful feature for us—and for our customers.”

Delivers Seamless Environment for DevelopersRiyaz Prasla, Program Manager for Fetch! at IDV Solutions, says the comprehensive Windows development environment simplifies both initial development and ongoing improvements for any company that has Windows-based expertise and is using Windows Azure. “For any Microsoft shop such as ours, there is a lot of expertise that is directly applicable to any Windows Azure cloud components.

“With Windows Azure, we could jump into the project using our .NET expertise, quickly ramp up, and then deploy a solid app, whether for a smartphone or tablet device,” he says, noting that the design stage took about a month, and then it took another three months to fully deploy the app. “That time to deployment went quickly, and any modifications we have for Fetch! Will be

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"We have customers with tens of thousands of users, and being able to click a button and go from having two load-balanced web servers to having a dozen or more in a matter of minutes is a very powerful feature for us—and for our customers.”

Scott Caulk, Vice President of Product Management,

IDV Solutions

very fast,” he adds. “If we had gone for a non-Microsoft cloud platform, our development time probably would have been slowed by weeks, if not months.”Microsoft Cloud ServicesMicrosoft offers a complete set of cloud-based solutions to meet business needs, including solutions for advertising, commu-nications (email, meetings), collaboration (document storage, sharing, workflow), business applications (customer resource management, business productivity), data storage and management, and infrastruc-ture services. In addition, customers can take advantage of an entire ecosystem of solution providers and Microsoft partners. For more information, please visit www.microsoft.com/cloud.

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about IDV Solutions products and services, call (517) 853-3755 or visit the website at: www.idvsolutions.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published April 2012

Software and Services Windows Azure− Windows Azure Compute− Windows Azure Service Bus− Windows Azure Storage

Microsoft SQL Azure Windows Phone

Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Microsoft Visual Studio− Microsoft Visual Basic

Microsoft SharePoint technologies− PerformancePoint Services

Technologies− Microsoft ASP.NET