Windows AzureCustomer Solution Case Study

Software Firm Expands Opportunities, Extends Cloud Services to Customers

OverviewCountry or Region: IndiaIndustry: IT services

Customer ProfileFounded in 2002, Symphony Services is a software product engineering outsourcing services company headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Business SituationSymphony wanted to deliver the performance, scalability, and flexibility of cloud computing to its customers, while reducing development, maintenance, and infrastructure costs.

SolutionSymphony used the Windows Azure platform to develop SUMMIT, a comprehensive enterprise IT management suite, which allows organizations to improve IT governance, optimize service levels, and reduce related costs.

Benefits Avoids capital expenses Simplifies maintenance Provides superior scalability

“…With SUMMIT, we have ensured that our customers can take advantage of cloud computing to enhance their IT Services to its employees, while reducing the costs they would otherwise incur to purchase, manage, and maintain an expanded on-premises IT infrastructure.”

S. Vijayashanker, Vice President, Symphony Services

Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Symphony Services is a global software product engineering outsourcing services company. It works with the world’s leading technology product companies, helping them evolve and expand their business and significantly bolster competitive advantage. As a market leader, Symphony wanted to help its customers obtain the benefits of cloud computing. It used the Windows Azure platform to develop SUMMIT, an Enterprise Service and Systems Management product that enables customers to deploy, manage, and monitor applications on the cloud. As a result, customers avoid costly capital expenditures along with the hassle of maintaining an on-premises infrastructure. Symphony provided its customers with vast computing power, and enhanced business agility while maintaining full control of their data and security processes.

SituationSymphony Services is a leading global specialist, providing software product engineering outsourcing services to Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), software enabled businesses and companies whose products contain embedded software. These companies partner with Symphony Services to achieve their business goals, by relying on its commitment to drive real business results and its proven ability to deliver high-quality services and support throughout the product lifecycle.

Symphony Services is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and has major Global Operations Centers in the US, India and China. Utilizing a multi-shore delivery approach, the company maximizes quality and efficiency, while minimizing costs for its clients. The company’s 3,500+ employees globally support over 1,200 new software releases annually, helping clients drive unparalleled innovation while bringing predictability to costs, schedules and quality of the outsourced engineering process.

Though the solutions are robust and offer tangible benefits, the infrastructure required to run them can be cost-prohibitive for many client businesses. The capital expenditures associated with purchasing hardware, renting server space for application servers and database servers, and hiring IT personnel to manage and maintain those servers are challenges that further compound expenses and can be daunting for businesses.

To help its clients operate more efficiently, Symphony wanted to offer a solution that

would help reduce the capital costs involved to procure server hardware and software, manage data centers, and hire additional personnel to maintain the infrastructure. In an effort to give businesses a way to cost-effectively use its IT management software without the need to invest in expensive infrastructure, Symphony decided that it would develop a line of software-as-a-service solutions delivered through the cloud that is, the applications and customer data would be hosted in data centers and delivered over the Internet.

SolutionTo deliver the performance and flexibility of cloud computing to its customers, Symphony developed an ITSM suite called SUMMIT in year. Built on the Windows Azure™ platform, an Internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, it provides an operating system, data storage, and a set of developer services for creating a range of flexible, cost-effective solutions.

“Windows Azure provided a compelling option,” says S. Vijayashanker, Vice President, Symphony Services. “It is an optimal cloud computing solution that includes more services than any other offerings, not to mention hands-off, low-cost maintenance.”

SUMMIT is a comprehensive enterprise IT management suite that allows organizations of all industry sectors and sizes to improve IT governance, optimize service levels, increase productivity and reduce related costs, supporting automation, thus providing maximum benefits with minimum resource

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“As the solution is hosted in Microsoft data centers, our customers are saving significant support time and costs that they would have spent otherwise for monitoring, and managing the IT infrastructure.”

Vasudev Nayak, Director, Symphony Services

requirements. An ITIL V3 certified Enterprise Service and Systems Management product enables you to manage enterprise IT environments (on premises or on Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) environment). It’s built according to ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) best practices that help enterprises establish a standardized set of processes for better IT management.The company is primarily offering services to Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) it works with, helping enterprises virtualize its applications on the Microsoft Azure platform. “Cloud is a path breaking innovation,” says Vijayashanker. “We are helping our enterprise customers to evaluate the same and stay away from the burden of capital expenditure.” SUMMIT supports the following IT processes: Incident Management Change Management Problem Management Service Level Management Project Management Availability Management (server,

application, network monitoring) Software Delivery Management Asset Management Configuration Management Knowledge Management

By using SUMMIT, customers retain full control and exclusive use of their data and its security, privacy, and compliance processes. Powering SUMMIT with Windows Azure gives customers the elasticity, scalability, and agility along with the cost benefits of cloud computing.

BenefitsBy using Windows Azure to implement SUMMIT, Symphony is helping to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing among its enterprise customers. The solution provides enterprises with vast computing power, enhanced business flexibility, full control of its important data and processes, and the capabilities it needs to meet a growing range of challenges. Avoids Capital Expenses“From a business perspective, the capital cost to build an infrastructure to host an on-premises model was outrageously expensive for our customers,” says Vasudev Nayak, Director, Symphony Services. “With SUMMIT, we have ensured that our customers can take advantage of cloud computing to enhance their IT capacity, while reducing the costs they would otherwise incur to purchase, manage, and maintain an expanded on-premises IT infrastructure.”

With Windows Azure, customers can avoid making costly investments in IT infrastructure. The platform provides a low cost option for hosting business services. Because Windows Azure is hosted in Microsoft data centers, enterprise customers who use the platform don’t have to pay any upfront costs instead they only have to pay for the compute and storage costs that they use.

Simplifies MaintenanceBy using Windows Azure to build SUMMIT, Symphony is helping customers gain operational visibility and granular application control. As a result, customers are assured of operational excellence and optimized performance. “As the solution is hosted in Microsoft data centers, our customers are saving significant support

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time and costs that they would have spent otherwise for monitoring, and managing the IT infrastructure,” says Vasudev.

Provides Superior ScalabilityIn addition to cutting capital expenses, customers can also scale up and down with Windows Azure. “With SUMMIT, our customers do not need to worry about configuring and deploying new physical servers to meet their increasing computing needs,” says Vijayashanker. “They can quickly scale up when they need extra compute and storage resources, as well as scale down when only fewer resources are needed. This way they do not worry about paying for servers that are not in use.”

Windows Azure PlatformThe Windows Azure platform provides an excellent foundation for expanding online product and service offerings. The main components include: Windows Azure. Windows Azure is the

development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers. In addition, Windows Azure serves developers’ connectivity needs through the following services.

Microsoft Azure Data Market. DataMarket section of Windows Azure Marketplace, formerly known as Codename Dallas, includes data, imagery, and real-time web services

from leading commercial data providers and authoritative public data sources.

Windows Azure platform AppFabric. With Windows Azure platform AppFabric, developers can build and manage applications more easily both on-premises and in the cloud.

− The AppFabric Service Bus connects services and applications across network boundaries to help developers build distributed applications.

− The AppFabric Access Control. Provides federated, claims-based access control for REST Web services.

Microsoft SQL Azure − Microsoft SQL Azure offers the first

cloud-based relational and self-managed database service built on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 technologies. To learn more about the Windows Azure platform, visit: www.windowsazure.com

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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 Symphony Services products and services, call (91) (80) 3027 1000, (91) 98453 79168. or visit the Web site at: www.symphonysv.com

For more information about the product, visit the Web site at: www.summussoftware.com

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

Document published May 2011

Software and Services Windows Azure Platform Microsoft SQL Azure