<p> Microsoft SQL Azure Partner Solution Case Study</p><p>Software Provider Offers Cloud-Based Database, Sales Jump 50 Percent</p><p>Overview “SQL Azure is one of the most tangible ways I’ve seen Country or Region: United States the cloud touch our customers and our business. Every Industry: Information technology hosted sale I’ve made in Europe, Australia, and South Partner Profile Africa, I’ve made because of SQL Azure.” Quosal is based in Woodinville, Washington, and provides sales quote Kent McNall, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Quosal and proposal preparation, delivery, and management software packages built Quosal wanted to offer a hosted version of its quote and with Microsoft technologies. proposal software to customers around the world, but this </p><p>Business Situation would require building three new data centers. After Microsoft The company wanted to offer a hosting launched Windows Azure, Quosal turned to Microsoft SQL option for Quosal customers around the world, but it did not have the resources Azure, a cloud-based, relational database built on Microsoft SQL to build the infrastructure required to Server technologies, as an alternative to building its own global capture this lucrative market. hosting infrastructure. Almost overnight this 10-person company Solution gained access to a worldwide market of customers who benefit Quosal turned to Microsoft SQL Azure to offer scalable database services from from having their Quosal databases hosted in the cloud, rather Microsoft. With very little effort, Quosal than managing their own on-premises servers. In two years, can now offer a hosted alternative to global customers. Quosal increased its hosted client base by 50 percent and global sales by 50 percent—while avoiding a planned US$300,000 in Benefits Reduces cost of doing business infrastructure costs and ongoing monthly maintenance costs of Improves reliability and scalability $6,000. Simplifies application deployment by 33 percent Builds a competitive advantage</p><p>Situation about all aspects of a customer’s quote and In 2005, Quosal founders created a proposal activities. “SQL Server is the company to take advantage of the fact that cornerstone of Quosal, and after two years approximately 40 percent of business of development, we’ve architected a transacted around the world is achieved database that’s optimized for what we do,” through quote and proposal. With a says McNall. “Thanks to the interoperability combined 20 years of sales and IT of Microsoft technologies, we can use the experience between them, Kent McNall, smart client capability of Windows Stephen Yu, and a handful of developers Presentation Foundation to dynamically worked to build and market quote and update SQL Server every time we make proposal automation software based on changes to our product.” leading-edge technologies. Demand for Software-as-a-Service “This market has been stagnant for some Quosal offers two license methods: a time, so we started Quosal with a goal to perpetual license where a customer owns move the science of quote automation the license and installs the application on a forward,” says McNall, Chief Executive desktop to run against a local database, Officer of Quosal. “That’s why we decided and a hosted scenario where customers pay to build our products from the ground up a monthly fee for each user and Quosal with Microsoft technologies.” hosts the data in its data center in Seattle. The only difference between the two Sales professionals use the company’s models is that customers opting for the flagship product, also called Quosal, to software-as-a-service model use a thin create high-quality and attractive quotes client–based version and must be online to and proposals electronically, taking use the product. advantage of built-in pricing and availability, promotions, product In the two years since Quosal was released, specifications, and images. Quosal is an the company has seen an increasing enterprise-level, database-centric demand for the hosted version. With a application built on the Microsoft .NET growing awareness of the cost savings and Framework and developed using the flexibility of cloud-based services, more Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 businesses are deciding that they would Team Suite development system that runs rather spend their time and money on core on the Windows Vista and Windows 7 competencies than building their own operating systems. McNall and Yu chose infrastructure. Windows Presentation Foundation as the graphical framework for the application, a “Quosal needs a central database, but for move that McNall describes as “the best many of our customers this requirement experience we’ve had with the Microsoft was a barrier to deployment,” says McNall. development tools in a combined 50 years “If I have a small enterprise with 12 sales of development.” people working across a large geographical area, but I can’t afford to acquire a license On the back end, the application uses for SQL Server or I don’t want to set up and either Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or manage a virtual private network for my Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data distributed sales reps to access the management software to store information database, then I’m a perfect customer for </p><p>26 the hosted version. And there are lots of Even though they evaluated other cloud- customers in that position.” based solutions, it didn’t take long for McNall and Yu to see the potential that Limited Hosting Capabilities SQL Azure held for their company. “We However, with a staff of 10 people and a looked at Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, limited IT and marketing budget, Quosal [Amazon EC2] and the salesforce platform faced a challenge in satisfying the growing but decided in favor of SQL Azure for demand for a software-as-a-service several reasons,” says Yu. “SQL Azure is deployment approach. To maintain its high based on .NET technology and because we service level agreement for application are already integrated with SQL Server performance, the company only offered the database software, the transition to the hosted option to customers who work close cloud would be very easy. Second, the price enough to its data center to ensure that point for SQL Azure is more compelling. latency on the network does not result in With Amazon, we would have to charge our degradation of performance. customers on a specific usage and computing basis, versus SQL Azure, which “We had a huge potential market for our is on a storage and transfer basis.” hosted customers—virtually a global market—and no way to satisfy them,” says This decision was not taken lightly. Amazon McNall. “If we wanted to ensure a reliable, EC2 uses MySQL database software and scalable product with good performance Quosal has an option for customers to use for these global customers, we would have its software running on MySQL. So the to build regional hosting centers, incurring company decided to pilot an integration large upfront labor and infrastructure costs, project with Amazon EC2. “We ran into not to mention ongoing maintenance.” problems right away,” says Sam Demulling, Senior Engineer at Quosal. “There was no McNall and Yu were actually finalizing the chance to preview the software: you had to plans to build regional centers in three purchase it to try it as a developer. We also global markets when Microsoft introduced ran into performance problems: our Windows Azure, a cloud services software took an enormously long time to development, hosting, and management launch, which would not work well with our environment. Suddenly, it looked like they customers.” might have a far better solution to their problem. By taking advantage of SQL Azure, Quosal could give global customers the choice to Solution use the hosted version of the solution and Quosal was particularly interested in store their quote and proposal data on Microsoft SQL Azure, a cloud-based, servers in Microsoft data centers around relational database built on SQL Server the world. And with Microsoft hosting their technologies. Windows Azure serves as the data, Quosal customers benefit from a development, run-time, and control highly available, scalable, multitenant environment and provides cloud services database service. SQL Azure behaves for connecting applications running in the almost exactly like SQL Server—complete cloud or on-premises. with indexes, views, stored procedures, and triggers—except that it offers a cloud- Global Market Potential</p><p>36 based infrastructure that is virtually connection file that allowed us to access transparent to Quosal customers. the SQL Azure database rather than our own hosted infrastructure.” “SQL Azure gave us an instant, super- reliable, high-performance worldwide The team used object-relational mapping infrastructure for our hosted offering,” says (ORM), a programming technique for McNall. “It was like being given sudden translating data between incompatible type access to a global marketplace at zero cost systems, to automatically convert changes to the company.” in Quosal’s business objects into schema changes in the SQL Azure databases. Going Seamless Migration to the Cloud forward, the team can still continue to McNall and Yu were thrilled at how easy it update the product automatically, using was to fine tune their self-maintaining ORM to perform quarterly updates and database to run in the cloud environment. hotfixes. Because SQL Azure provides the same Tabular Data Stream protocol used for “This was such an easy move to the cloud communicating between client and server, for us because Microsoft did a brilliant job developers can use the same tools and making SQL Azure look like a local libraries that they use to store data in the database,” says McNall. “It only took a on-premises version of Quosal. And thanks couple of hours to migrate the data into to the similarity between SQL Azure and SQL Azure, then we did our quality SQL Server, Yu and the development team assurance, and we were good to go.” applied their existing programming skills. They also used Microsoft SQL Server Quosal signed its first customer on SQL Management Studio to simplify the process Azure in December 2009, when the offering of migrating the on-premises database was still in its beta version. “The whole version of Quosal to SQL Azure. “We were deployment was a plug-and-play able to use SQL Server Management Studio experience,” recalls McNall. “Customers to export the data from a local SQL Server who sign up for the hosted Quosal solution 2005 instance and move it seamlessly into a simply set up their own SQL Azure account SQL Azure instance,” says Yu. and are off and running.” </p><p>The company’s developers only needed to Benefits make a few adjustments before getting the For Quosal, SQL Azure helped open the Quosal solution to run in the SQL Azure doors to a global marketplace almost environment. “Because the on-premises overnight. It took less than a day’s worth of instance of SQL Server has slightly different effort for Quosal to reduce the cost of connection information than the SQL Azure doing business, improve the reliability of its database, we tweaked our connection hosted offering, and simplify application strings,” explains Yu. “And because some of deployment. And now that customers our installation processes assumed that we around the world can choose a software- were working with a local instance of SQL as-a-service approach for their Quosal Server, we had to change our installers in application and experience all the benefits order to handle remote connecting via the of running Quosal against a SQL Azure different connection strengths. We database, the company is further changed the Quosal installer to create a differentiating itself from competitors to </p><p>46 build its business, adding approximately 75 when actions are performed against the new companies since it deployed the database. And in the case of a hardware solution 10 months ago. failure, SQL Azure provides automatic failover to optimize availability for every “SQL Azure is one of the most tangible Quosal customer. ways I’ve seen the cloud touch our customers and our business,” says McNall. “We have approximately 200 customers on “Every hosted sale I’ve made in Europe, SQL Azure, and in the 24 months since Australia, and South Africa, I’ve made going live with the solution, I can count on because of SQL Azure. We’ve increased our one hand the number of support calls that hosted client base by 50 percent to almost we have received,” says McNall. 25 percent of our overall clients. Those are the results we were really hoping for.” By using SQL Azure, Quosal also avoids overextending valuable infrastructure Reduced Cost of Doing Business resources to accommodate expected Before SQL Azure, Quosal planned to open demand. Instead, the company can take its own data centers in three global advantage of the elastic, scalable markets, a significant undertaking for a infrastructure offered by SQL Azure, with company with 10 employees. Building a customers signing up for the services using worldwide data hosting infrastructure a flexible pay-as-you-go format. And as would have required a large upfront cost, with other cloud technologies, customers including expensive hardware and the pay only for what they use. Now Quosal administration necessary to hire and train can grow its business without the new employees to manage the facilities. challenges of demand forecasting and scaling resources up and down to meet a By using SQL Azure, Quosal can rely on changing customer base. Microsoft to manage the data centers, relieving the company of the support costs Simplified Application Deployment and burden of hosting its applications for As Quosal no longer needs to provision customers. Instead, Quosal can focus on databases for customers who choose the what it does best, developing quote and hosted deployment option, the company proposal software. “We are saving [US] can set them up 33 percent more quickly. $300,000 immediately by not having to Instead of spending time on IT build those three data centers,” says administration to service a new customer, McNall. “And we are avoiding ongoing Quosal simply helps them quickly set up a maintenance costs of $6,000 a month. At SQL Azure account. “SQL Azure the same time, the market opportunity that dramatically changes the deployment time we gain is immeasurable.” frames and ease of management for thousands of small, medium, and large Improved Reliability and Scalability businesses,” says McNall. “It only takes While Quosal maintained a high service minutes for a Quosal customer to gain an level agreement for its customers, the enterprise-class database. Our customers company is happy to offload that love the ease of deployment so much that responsibility to Microsoft going forward. about 33 percent of our licensed customers SQL Azure maintains three copies of the opt to run their database in SQL Azure data and ensures database consistency rather than on-premises.”</p><p>56 Windows Azure Builds a Competitive Advantage Windows Azure provides developers the The hosted Quosal solution is attractive to functionality to build applications that span customers for many reasons, and every one from consumer to enterprise scenarios. The of them helps to differentiate the company key components of Windows Azure are: from its competitors. Customers benefit from a cost-effective, highly secure, turnkey Windows Azure. Windows Azure is a alternative to maintaining their data on- development, service hosting, and premises. “We wouldn’t be excited about service management environment. It SQL Azure if our customers weren’t excited provides developers with on-demand about it. We keep getting the same compute, storage, bandwidth, content feedback, ‘What’s not to like?’, and that’s delivery, middleware, and marketplace reflected in the growth of our hosted customer base,” concludes McNall. “All I capabilities to build, host, and scale web can say is that SQL Azure is one of the applications through Microsoft data finest Microsoft product offerings I’ve ever centers. been involved with.” Microsoft SQL Azure. Microsoft SQL Azure is a self-managed, multitenant relational cloud database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies. It provides built-in high availability, fault tolerance, and scale-out database capabilities, as well as cloud-based data synchronization and reporting, to build custom enterprise and web applications and extend the reach of data assets.</p><p>To learn more, visit: www.windowsazure.com www.sqlazure.com </p><p>66</p>