Page 175 - DCAP312_WEB_TECHNOLOGIES_II

Unit 8: Creating More Advanced ASP.NET

Notes
Changing the Business Model
Naylor had always preferred the idea of an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) model,
one that would showcase the company’s uniquely adaptable and extensible middleware.
“We wanted to leverage our core telemetry infrastructure for a number of applications,”
he explains. “However, like a lot of startup companies, we needed immediate access to the
market, so we developed EcoView. We just got stuck there. I wanted to back out of our
direct market approach and deliver our product to new verticals through OEM licenses.”

The OEM model would absolve the company of the burden of directly marketing and
supporting its product to customers, freeing up time and resources to build more features
into its telemetry software. “We tried to build maximum extensibility into our middleware,
but there’s always room for more flexible configurations to accommodate as many requests
as we can from customers,” says Naylor. “It would have been nice to have more time to
devote to that sort of development work.”
Also, the new business model would give the company an opportunity to enter untapped
vertical markets that it simply did not have the resources to acquire on its own. “Our core
technology is designed to accommodate any remote monitoring scenario,” says Naylor. “The
OEM model, whereby licensees could take our product to market in new verticals using our
core technology, was so compelling that we knew we had to make the change.”
But there was a significant, and by now all too familiar, stumbling block to moving ahead
with this key business strategy: the company’s reliance on a physical IT infrastructure. Even
if an OEM was interested in licensing Advanced Telemetry software, it was obvious that it
would quickly come up against the same issues that plagued the startup from the beginning.
“We had to move our infrastructure to a cloud-computing model where our application and
data could reside on remotely hosted servers for which the OEMs would not be responsible,”
says Naylor. “So along with a new business model, we were suddenly contemplating a new
computing paradigm.”

Solution
Advanced Telemetry first considered storing its historical data on BigTable from Google, but
that still left its middleware and web tiers residing on collocated servers. The company wanted
a complete solution for running its Windows-based application and storing its data in the
cloud. Naylor found what the company needed with Windows Azure from Microsoft. Moving
its entire IT environment to Windows Azure would mean that Advanced Telemetry could
take advantage of the following components offering integrated cloud computing services:

• Windows Azure: Provides a Windows-based environment for running applications
and storing data on servers in Microsoft data centers. Advanced Telemetry could use
Windows Azure cloud compute services to run the company’s web presentation tier and
remote monitoring and control middleware. And it could use Windows Azure Storage
to store its customers’ nonrelational historical data.
• Microsoft SQL Azure: Provides a relational database service in the cloud based on SQL
Server 2008. Advanced Telemetry could use SQL Azure to store customers’ configurations
and metadata.
“With Windows Azure, I realized right away that this was more than a new computing
environment, it was a key business enabler,” says Naylor. “It was easy to see that basing
our operations on an Internet connection instead of racks of servers running in our facility
would literally transform our business.” Advanced Telemetry also liked the fact that Windows
Contd...

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