343 Industries
Problem: The 343 Industries development team hosts and manages the Halo 4 installment in the Halo video game franchise. Before the game’s launch in November 2012, the team faced 2 challenges:
1) Gain insights into player behavior and user experience.
2) Analyze data during the 5-week “Halo Infinity Challenge” tournament that would accompany the launch.
Solution: Since the game was hosted on Azure, the team used HDInsight to processs and analyze the raw data. Game statistics were then sent to the tournament operator, Virgin Gaming, to create ranking systems. HDInsight was also used to update Halo 4 every week and support a daily email campaign that was employed for player retention.
Tangerine
Problem: Tangerine (formerly known as ING) is an online banking firm that along with changing its name, wanted to expand the scope of their business. But their primary issue was with the data that they possessed. They knew that because of their expansion plans, their data warehousing needed scalability. Also, the BI tools in-house were too technical for business leaders.
SolutIon: That’s where Azure HDInsight stepped in and offered a turnkey data analytics solution that was a responsive, scalable data warehouse solution. Now, Tangerine can predict customer behaviour, use feedback to adjust on the fly, all ensuring they deliver the services that the customers want.
Carnegie Mellon
Problem: Carnegie Mellon (CMU), one of the most coveted universities in the world, faces big data challenges in fields such as astrophysics and building management. Monitoring operational efficiency on buildings relies on collecting and analyzing data captured from sensors, actuators etc. whose failure the system cannot predict resulting in expensive system failures and wasted energy.
Solution: CMU now uses Azure and the PI System from Microsoft Global partner OSIsoft. Azure Machine Learning helps in better fault detection, diagnosis, and this more efficient operations. Using Azure, CMU has reduced projected energy usage by about 20%. Azure Machine Learning also simplified the creation process of machine learning models, accomplishing a weeks-long process in a few days.
Environment Agency, UK
Problem: The environment agency in the United Kingdom wanted to make its flood warning service more accessible to citizens and businesses by offering real-timeupdates on areas at risk.
Solution: Shoothill, a Microsoft Gold Partner, built a FloodAlerts application on Facebook using Microsoft Azure . The FloodAlerts application delivers localised updates every 15 minuted, informing users of the latest flood information. This application needed scalability, and Azure ensured for instant scalability. As a result of which, the Environment Agency could scale from 1 Million hits to a massive 15.6 Million hits.
Nest Investments Holdings Ltd.
Problem: Nest Investments (Holdings) Ltd. is a group of subsidiaries, associates and affiliates operating in more than twenty three countries, primarily across the Middle East and North Africa. Some of their offices had on-premise disaster recovery, and others didn’t. Nest decided to roll out a cloud-based disaster recovery platform across all its offices.
Solution: Deciding on Azure as its cloud platform, it began to realise the benefits of cloud-based tools. With both IaaS and PaaS services, Azure delivered a powerful combination of both managed and unmanaged services. Nest Investments is now making huge savings – they have no CAPEX, and have made a 90% saving thanks to Azure.
easyJet.com
Problem: easyJet, a leading low-fare airline in Europe, wanted to offer new features without costly investment in on-premises infrastructure. Offering new features, including the ability for customers to choose their own seats was a top priority. They needed a delivery platform that would be affordable, easy to manage, and highly scalable.
Solution: The airline decided to use Windows Azure platform and its PaaS offerings to enhance its reservation system. Customers now experience a seamless reservation process with the hybrid cloud booking solution. This solution has increased scalability, accelerated time-to-market, and cut costs. But most importantly, easyJet with the help of Azure, has helped make its customers happier.
Xerox
Problem: Xerox, a global leader in document management, realised that a more needs-driven approach was necessary to train employees, rather than a traditional classroom-based approach. With more than 1000 formal learning courses added yearly to Xerox learning solutions, this task wasn’t an easy one by any means.
Solution: Microsoft Circle Partner Ravnur used Azure’s PaaS solution to develop a cloud based video management solution and video portal, called XstreamVideo. Xerox can now empower and educate its geographically diverse workforce; reduce employee training time and increase effectiveness; avoid extra costs for third-party content and reveal employee expertise; and provide high availability and scalability without any investment in infrastructure.
The Washington Post
Problem: The Washington Post is an American daily newspaper that was founded in 1877 with a particular emphasis on national politics. They wished for a solution through which they could instantly verify what a politician says. The challenges for such a thing were great: converting speech to text, transcribing videos etc. would take a lot of time & effort.
Solution: Using Microsoft Azure Media Services Indexer, they built the Truth Teller. This solution automatically created transcripts, captions, and keywords extracted from the captions which were automatically generated. These keywords could then be searched against a local database of fact-checked statements from the newspaper’s own Fact Checker blog. Now, the Washington Post can more easily share its political expertise with its web visitors.
iKoula
Problem: iKoula is a leading hosting service provider in France, which is a quite competitive market. Their customers wanted more - more customized services, better customer support, all while providing the best price. This meant that they needed flexibility and scalability in moving workloads between their own data centers, iKoula data centers, and Azure.
Solution: After upgrading to the Windows Server 2012 R2 Operating System and deploying the Windows Azure pack, the customers can now provision and manage their own websites, virtual machines, and databases. The virtual machine provisioning and deprovisioning process is also much easier. iKoula thus not only expanded its business, but also reduced previous operational costs.