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| | |Windows Azure |

| | |Customer Solution Case Study |

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| | | |Vehicle Values Provider Saves $100,000 with Easy-to-Manage Software-plus-Services |

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|Overview | | |“With the flexibility of Windows Azure, we can focus on building and delivering new features to our |

|Country or Region: United States | | |customers—helping us increase our competitive advantage.” |

|Industry: Manufacturing—Automotive | | |Andy Lapin, Director of Enterprise Architecture, Kelley Blue Book |

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|Customer Profile | | | |

|Established in 1926 and based in Irvine, | | | |

|California, Kelley Blue Book is a premier | | | |

|vehicle valuation service. It employs 390 | | | |

|people. The company’s Web site has 14 million| | | |

|visitors each month. | | | |

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|Business Situation | | | |

|Kelley Blue Book sought a solution that would| | | |

|enable it to scale up quickly to meet the | | | |

|capacity demands of its high-traffic Web site| | | |

|and reduce its dependency on costly hardware.| | | |

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|Solution | | | |

|After evaluating other platforms, Kelley Blue| | | |

|Book chose to use a software-plus-services | | | |

|model and moved its Web site to the Windows | | | |

|Azure™ platform. | | | |

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|Benefits | | | |

|Reduced capital costs with flexible | | | |

|scalability | | | |

|Shifted focus to delivering | | | |

|Saved U.S.$100,000 annually | | | |

|Improved IT efficiency | | | |

| | | |Kelley Blue Book is a premier provider of vehicle pricing information to consumers, automotive |

| | | |dealers, governments, and the finance and insurance industries. The company developed its |

| | | |information-rich, high-traffic Web site using the Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 and supports it with |

| | | |two hosted data centers. In an effort to reduce hosting costs and ease management of its |

| | | |infrastructure, Kelley Blue Book decided to host and manage its Web site using a |

| | | |software-plus-services model. After evaluating software-plus-services solutions, the company |

| | | |implemented the Windows Azure™ platform—which proved to be a straightforward process. As a result, |

| | | |Kelley Blue Book is able to reduce capital expenditures for new hardware, increase its competitive |

| | | |advantage by focusing on delivering new features, save U.S.$100,000 annually in hosting costs, and |

| | | |use IT resources more strategically. |

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Situation

First published in 1926, Kelley Blue Book has grown to be a trusted source of automobile information, such as new- and used-car values. The company’s primary mission is to provide an automotive information and value exchange that gives consumers, automotive dealers, government, and companies in the finance and insurance industries the information they need to facilitate vehicle transactions. Originally only a published book, Kelley Blue Book is also now a Web site (), which launched more than a decade ago. The company is based in Irvine, California, and has 390 employees.

The Web site has grown leaps and bounds since its conception in 1995, allowing the company to continually expand its business and offer new products and features. In 2002, for example, in order to give consumers actual transaction prices for new cars, the company gathered data and analyzed transactions from thousands of dealers across the United States and introduced the Kelley Blue Book Value for New Cars. In 2009, Kelley Blue Book launched “The Trusted Marketplace,” giving consumers the ability to complete their vehicle research, conduct new- and used-vehicle inventory searches and find their next car, all on one convenient and easy-to-use Web site.

Today, the Kelley Blue Book Web site is built on the Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 with a server infrastructure supported by the Windows Server® 2003 Standard operating system and Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 Standard Edition data management software. The site has 14 million visitors each month; one out of three car shoppers in the United States uses Kelley Blue Book to conduct online research before making a vehicle purchase.

To support the compute power and data storage that the company needs to run its high-traffic Web site, Kelley Blue Book has two physical data centers—one primary data center and one failover data center. The company owns its own servers, but runs them in a hosting facility where it rents server space. As the company added new products and features to its Web site, and as traffic to the site increased over time, Kelley Blue Book responded by adding more servers to its infrastructure to handle peak traffic. “When we hit a point where we were exceeding traffic expectations, or when we deployed new code or new functionality that required more computing resources, we would buy enough servers to handle the maximum load and those servers would live on perpetually,” explains Andy Lapin, Director of Enterprise Architecture for Kelley Blue Book.

However, with daily, weekly, and season fluctuations in site traffic, the load was not evenly distributed over time. As a result, though the infrastructure had the capacity to support traffic during high-volume periods, the company was also paying for hosting services for under-utilized servers during nonpeak times. “We kept buying and buying hardware to ensure that we could handle peak load,” says Lapin.

Managing the servers also was time-consuming. For instance, to add servers to its failover data center location, which is out-of-state, the company had to order the servers from a vendor, fly personnel to the data center, and build and rack the servers—a process that took up to six weeks. When Kelley Blue Book needed to scale up quickly, such as when the “Cash for Clunkers” initiative launched in 2009, a six-week lead time to deploy new servers proved an inefficient model. Also, despite the company’s best efforts to mitigate project risks, not every deployment was flawless. Sometimes IT personnel found that additional computing resources were needed after new code was deployed. “If we deploy new functionality and we find the whole data center is down, we get into firefighting mode—we do everything we can to get it back up quickly, or figure out how to roll back code. Sometimes you can do that—and sometimes you can’t,” says Lapin.

Though Kelley Blue Book had the server capacity it needed to handle its peak Web site traffic, it sought a more efficient solution. The company wanted to be able to scale up more quickly to manage increasing site traffic, while at the same time making its server use during nonpeak times as cost-effective as possible.

Solution

To improve the efficiency of its platform, Kelley Blue Book investigated the possibility of moving to a software-plus-services model. The company looked at two solutions: the Windows Azure™ platform and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In April 2009, Kelley Blue Book decided to migrate to the Windows Azure platform, a solution that provides “cloud” services, the hosting and management of Web applications and services on the Internet through Microsoft data centers. The solution is designed for high availability and quick scaling to match usage needs.

The company chose the Windows Azure platform based, in part, on the services the platform offers: Windows Azure, a cloud services operating system; Microsoft SQL Azure, for extending storage to the cloud. In addition, it chose Windows Azure for its pay-per-use cost model, which allows the company to pay only for the compute processing and storage that it uses. “We had to find a way of justifying whether the ‘cloud’ made sense to us. The Windows Azure cost model is simple to figure out and easy to calculate the costs involved,” explains Lapin. “The Amazon model was more complicated and we couldn’t realistically determine what our savings would be.”

An Easy-to-Develop Solution

|“It is nice to have a flexible solution like |

|Windows Azure where we don’t have to pay any |

|upfront costs to get something deployed |

|quickly.” |

|Andy Lapin, Director of Enterprise |

|Architecture, Kelley Blue Book |

Developers at Kelley Blue Book were able to use their existing skill sets to deploy code to the Windows Azure platform, which made the implementation quick and straightforward. For the most part, developers reused code from the original Web site, developed with the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 Professional Edition development system, and simply migrated it to the Windows Azure platform. “We’re not forcing developers to write different code—it’s still the familiar .NET-based code,” explains Lapin. “Developers don’t have to make dramatic changes when deploying to Windows Azure versus deploying to a local data center. That is one of the things that makes Windows Azure the only logical choice.”

The company is moving all 27 Web servers and nine SQL Server databases to the cloud with Windows Azure, giving Kelley Blue Book the flexibility to redeploy those servers for other company needs without additional infrastructure investments.

Data Persistence Using Software-plus-Services

To take full advantage of the software-plus-services model, Kelley Blue Book looked at Windows Azure storage solutions. “We wanted to better utilize the cloud and look at other storage alternatives to ensure data persistence,” says Lapin. The company analyzed and then implemented Windows Azure Blob Storage and Windows Azure Tables.

As a way to reduce load on its remaining physical SQL Server databases, Kelley Blue Book is testing moving data that is traditionally stored relationally, such as editorial content, and moving it to Blob Storage and accessing it on the Internet through data centers hosted by Microsoft. It moved [several hundred] megabytes of data to Blob Storage, and now can access that data through those data centers instead of accessing it on its physical SQL Server databases. In the future, Kelley Blue Book plans to move its physical SQL Server databases to SQL Azure.

Benefits

Using the Windows Azure Platform, Kelley Blue Book efficiently implemented a cost-effective, flexible model for its Web site. By moving to a cloud solution for , the company was able to reduce capital expenditures, as well as data center and hosting costs. IT personnel are free now to focus on more strategic tasks, thanks to enterprise-class service from Microsoft. Today the company is focused on delivering new features and services to customers instead of managing risks at its data center.

Decreased Capital Expenditures with Flexible Scalability

With Windows Azure, Kelley Blue Book can avoid making costly investments in IT infrastructure at its failover data center and has the flexibility it needs to scale up quickly. Instead of buying additional servers each time the company needs more capacity for its Web site or each time it deploys a new product, it can quickly scale up without making costly hardware investments by using the processing power and storage capacity offered by Windows Azure and data centers hosted by Microsoft. “It is nice to have a flexible solution like Windows Azure where we don’t have to pay any upfront costs to get something deployed quickly,” says Lapin. “We have the flexibility that lets us figure out things as we go at a low cost.”

Improved Ability to Deliver New Services

As Kelley Blue Book grows, it continues to add new services and features to its Web site. The company has added new features at a fast rate since it developed the application on the .NET Framework in 2006. In fact, the company often deploys new code every week. Instead of worrying about the efficiency of the Web site each time it adds new features, or the risk involved with deploying new physical servers each time it adds a new product or increases capacity for growing traffic, Kelley Blue Book is now able to focus on innovation and delivering new products. The company is confident in the continued responsiveness of the Web site with Windows Azure—a key differentiator that helps the company maintain its competitive advantage.

“With the flexibility of Windows Azure, we can focus on building and delivering new features to our customers—helping us increase our competitive advantage,” concludes Lapin.

Reduced Data Center and Hosting Costs

With the Windows Azure Platform, Kelley Blue Book can manage its Web application using the Internet and data centers hosted by Microsoft. Though it is keeping its physical primary data center for now, it is moving its compute processing and storage at its failover data center to the “cloud.” As a result, it is decommissioning a total of 36 physical servers for —27 Web servers and nine SQL Server databases—and redeploying those servers to support other Kelley Blue Book products.

Kelley Blue Book analyzed the costs required to run on-premise servers compared to using Windows Azure and expects to save U.S.$100,000 in data center and hosting costs alone with the pay-by-use model of the platform. “Using Windows Azure is actually less expensive than just the power costs of our failover data center,” says Lapin. “We will see $100,000 in savings each year—a number that will increase because we would normally continue to add servers to that data center as we grow—and that does not include the personnel it requires to maintain the data center.”

More Strategic Use of IT Resources

Kelley Blue Book streamlined management of the IT infrastructure that supports its Web site. Instead of deploying new code and applications and applying service packs and updates to each server individually, the company can rely on enterprise-class service provided by Microsoft. “With Windows Azure, we never have to focus on updating a server or changing its configuration,” says Lapin. “It is all managed for us and all we have to worry about is deploying code to one place.”

By moving from on-premise servers to a cloud solution for , Kelley Blue Book can assign IT personnel to focus on more strategic tasks. For instance, instead of managing those servers at the data center, IT personnel can focus more on internal IT tasks. “We have plenty of work that needs to be done. Now those employees can work on more strategic efforts without constantly being pestered with issues at the data center,” explains Lapin. In addition, because IT employees can work more efficiently, Kelley Blue Book is able to hire new IT staff at a decelerated rate it has in the past.

Windows Azure Platform

The 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.

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

← The Access Control Service 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:



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|“Using Windows Azure .… We will see $100,000 |

|in savings each year—a number that will |

|increase because we would normally continue to|

|add servers to that data center as we grow.” |

|Andy Lapin, Director of Enterprise |

|Architecture, Kelley Blue Book |

|“With Windows Azure, we never have to focus on|

|updating a server or changing its |

|configuration. It is all managed for us and |

|all we have to worry about is deploying code |

|to one place.” |

|Andy Lapin, Director of Enterprise |

|Architecture, Kelley Blue Book |

| |

|Software and Services |Microsoft Visual Studio |

|Windows Azure Platform |Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition |

|Windows Azure |Solutions |

|Microsoft SQL Azure |Software-plus-services |

|Technologies | |

|Microsoft |Partner |

|Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 |Neudesic |

|Microsoft Server Product Portfolio | |

|Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition | |

|Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition | |

|This case study is for informational purposes | |

|only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR| |

|IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. | |

| | |

|Document published November 2009 | |

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