Windows Azure Customer and Partner News

There are many exciting new customers adopting the Windows Azure Platform, earlier this week we announced that Transport for London would move their ‘Trackernet’ application to the Windows Azure Platform and today brings more news from three of Microsoft’s customers and partners, including Novell, ADP and MAQ Software.

Today, Novell announced it has joined the Microsoft Windows Azure Technology Adoption Program (TAP) to address cloud security challenges through the Novell® Cloud Security Service.  With Novell Cloud Security Service, developers using Windows Azure will be able to quickly and easily extend any business identity and access management infrastructure to Windows Azure. Changes made to user access permissions within an organization’s application infrastructure using Novell Cloud Security Service will be immediately replicated in the cloud. The result will help customers using Windows Azure to deliver a consistent identity and security framework to address compliance needs in heterogeneous cloud environments, while keeping critical identity data secure behind customers' firewalls. More information about Novell’s entry into the Windows Azure TAP and their Cloud Security Service is available on the Windows Azure blog.

Also announced today, The Dealer Service Group of Automatic Data Processing (ADP) now enables plug-and-play payment processing for thousands of car dealers throughout North America with Windows Azure.  ADP has added NVoicePay as a participant to their Third Party Access Program, which helps mutual clients eliminate paper invoices and checks with an integrated electronic payments solution, also powered by the Windows Azure cloud platform.  Each dealership stands to save tens of thousands of dollars per year depending on its size, by using the NVoicePay solution. According to NVoicePay leveraging Azure to enable its payment network allowed the solution to go from zero to nearly $50 million in payment traffic in a single year. For more information about ADP and NVoicePay’s work with the Windows Azure platform, check out the news release here.

Finally, as part of our “Real World Windows Azure” series, MAQ Software’s program manager, Girish Kundlani discussed how MAQ Software uses the Windows Azure platform for the company's enterprise resource management applications.  Kundali said, “We now have solutions that aren't limited by a physical infrastructure and offer us the scalability that we need for continued growth. We don't have to buy servers to deploy; we can take advantage of Windows Azure and Microsoft data centers to add more computing resources for improved performance and more storage as our capacity needs increase-plus, with 99.99 percent up-time, we have the high availability we need. We have also reduced our hosting costs from up to U.S. $400 per application to only $66 per application each month and, at the same time, were able to bring our applications to market quickly.” Visit the Windows Azure blog for the full interview.

For more information about how companies are embracing Microsoft’s Platform as a Service offering, check out other Windows Azure case studies here.