Azure ROI Calculator

I'm pleased to announce the availability of Neudesic's Azure ROI Calculator, available online at http://azureroi.cloudapp.net. This is a beta tool we are soliciting feedback on.

The ROI Calculator lets you estimate what your monthly cloud computing charges will be on the Azure Services Platform. It also helps you determine what your return on investment will be if you migrate an application over to the cloud.



Let's take it for a spin, starting with the Monthly Cloud Charges tab (shown above). You can do a lot of different things with the Azure Services Platform. Estimate your consumption in each of the areas you plan to use--hosting, database, storage, service bus, and communication in or out of the data center. You can find explanations for each of these topics by clicking on a heading. Daily, monthly, and yearly costs are computed and displayed and update automatically as you make changes to the parameters. If you want to see some example configurations, click on the Small, Medium or Large radio buttons.

The Migration and ROI tab (shown below) helps you determine your return on investment for migrating an enterprise application over to the cloud. To use this, first enter the monthly costs of operating your current enterprise application. Next, estimate the cost and amount of months to revise your software for the cloud. The final parameter is your monthly cloud costs. This value is automatically set from the Monthly Cloud Charges tab so you don't have to enter it. The ROI calculator will plot your running costs during and after the migration period and will determine your break even point and monthly savings going forward.




At the next Azure User Group meetings across the country we'll be discussing the rates and other recent Azure announcements and we'll show you how to compute your cloud computing costs and ROI.

OC Azure User Group Meeting Thursday 7/23/09 on Azure MEBAs and Multi-Tenant SaaS

The next Azure User Group meeting in Orange County is this Thursday, July 23, 6-8pm at Quickstart Intelligence, 16815 Von Karman Ave. Suite 100, Irvine, CA 92606

The topic for this month's Azure User Group meeting is Multi-Enterprise Business Applications (MEBAs), a new class of applications the cloud is ideally suited for. We'll also look at SaaS considerations and weigh single-tenant vs. multi-tenant approaches.

In addition we'll share the recent Azure announcements, including rates.

http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=139688

Hope to see you there!

Azure User Group Meeting in San Diego 7/09/09 on MEBAs and SaaS

The next Azure User Group meeting in San Diego is this Thursday, July 9.

The topic for this month's Azure User Group meeting is Multi-Enterprise Business Applications (MEBAs), a new class of applications the cloud is ideally suited for. We'll also look at SaaS considerations and weigh single-tenant vs. multi-tenant approaches. Hope to see you there!

As usual, we're meeting at AMN Healthcare at 6pm and we'll have pizza and beverages.

RSVP link: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=139350

AMN Healthcare
12400 High Bluff Dr, #100
San Diego, CA 92130

Azure Developer Challange Grand Prize Winners

Congratulations to the winners of the Azure Developer Challenge. The judges awarded the grand prizes to Kevin Rohling for Impulse and Laith Yousif for Twtri. Check them out.

However, this is not quite over. There's still a community-chosen winner. Voting remains open till 6/29. My entry is Joint Venture.

Speaking on Azure Design Patterns at So Cal Code Camp

I'll speaking at So Cal Code Camp this weekend in San Diego. My talk is on Azure Design Patterns, Saturday at 2:30.

This session will present Design Patterns for cloud computing on the Azure platform. Azure provides oodles of functionality that range from application hosting and storage to enterprise-grade security and workflow. Design patterns help you think about these capabilities in the right way and how they can be combined into composite applications. We'll cover design patterns for hosting, data, communication, synchronization, and security as well as composite application patterns that combine them. We'll be doing hands-on code demos of a number of composite applications, including a grid computing application.

Azure Design Patterns Web Site

Vote for Me!

My entry in the Azure Developer Contest is Joint Venture, a business collaboration application. One of the contest winners is selected by community voting, so if you're reading this before 6/29/09 I'd appreciate it if you would check out the app and consider voting for it, which only takes 5 seconds. Simply go to the contest site, select the app you want to vote for (my app is listed at the bottom of the voting list), and click Submit Vote. Regardless of who wins, it's good to see app building going on for Azure.

"Joint Venture": New Azure Multi-Business Enterprise Application (MEBA)

I'm pleased to announce my latest Silverlight-Azure reference application which is called Joint Venture. Joint Venture provides a workspace for cross-business project teams. That is, teams made up of people from more than one business who are working on some kind of business collaboration. This is an example of a Multi-Enterprise Business Application (MEBA), an app used by multiple businesses who have a relationship with each other. The cloud is an ideal place for business collaboration, providing a neutral location that can be easily and universally accessed.

Here's a screen capture of what Joint Venture looks after a user has logged in and is viewing one of the projects they belong to. In this example, there is a 3-way collaboration between AdventureWorks (a manufacturer of camping and sporting equipment), Northwind Traders (a national retailer who will be distributing AdventureWorks' products), and Woodgrove Bank (a financial partner who provides credit services to consumers). The team member names, photos, roles, and companies are shown along with contact information. Project documents can be uploaded and downloaded.



Viewing a Project (click to enlarge)

Any member of the team can see the project team and project documents. Each team member is granted an access level by the project owner (viewer, contributor, or administrator ). A viewer can see the team and project documents but can't add or change anything. A contributor can add or update documents but can't change any team information other than their own. An administrator can change anything in the project, including making changes to the makeup of the team.

Team members don't have to be members of Joint Venture in order to be added to a project. In the screen capture, you see that some members are shown with photos, indicating they have visited Joint Venture and set up profiles. Other team members are shown with a default team member icon--they can still be included in the project even if they haven't joined the site yet. Once they do, their pictures will appear and the project will be available to them. It's the use of email address as unique identifier that provides the linkage between users and projects.

Technically, Joint Venture makes heavy use of Silverlight, WCF, Azure, and Windows Live ID. The cloud is used in 3 ways: to host the Silverlight application and WCF web service, to authenticate users via Windows Live ID, and to store user profiles and project information. The web service is necessary because Silverlight can't directly make calls to cloud services due to its security model. Silverlight calls the web service and the web service handles all of the storage and recall of data. Cloud blob storage is used in the same way you would use a file-system in a local application.

Joint Venture is just getting started. It needs to be extended and refined before I consider sharing it on CodePlex. In the meantime it can be accessed online at http://jointventure.cloudapp.net and I'm interested in feedback on where to take it next. Future plans include extending project information to include folders for project documents, a threaded discussion board, and a project plan/timeline.