“With Windows Azure, we can tailor the configuration of the infrastructure to fit each customer’s exact needs and deploy our solution in minutes, rather than hours or days.”

Nathan Brouwer, Manager of Global Partner Support, Figlo

Figlo, an independent software vendor (ISV) that builds financial planning tools for professional advisors, wanted to expand internationally. It needed a way to cost-effectively scale its self-hosted Figlo Platform solution to meet increased demand, so it moved the solution to Windows Azure. Now the company can rapidly deploy the Figlo Platform to customers worldwide and saves U.S.$22,000 a year on each instance that it manages.

Business NeedsFiglo develops financial planning solutions that advisors use in working with their clients. The company’s flagship product, the Figlo Platform, offers professionals a rich set of data visualization tools for tracking client asset performance. Advisors can also provide logon credentials to clients, so that they can track income and investment information through a personalized web portal.

The Figlo Platform is optimized for desktop and portable computers and mobile phones, and the Microsoft Surface multitouch computing platform. “With our solution, advisors can provide clients with anywhere access to account data while offering a variety of ways to interact with their financial information,” says Nathan Brouwer, Manager of Global Partner Support at Figlo.

One of the key differentiators of the Figlo Platform is its advanced multicurrency calculation engine. The ability to adapt this component to fit local financial regulations gives Figlo a distinct advantage in selling its solution in international markets. As the company targeted global distribution of the Figlo Platform, executives wanted to ensure that it could scale to meet increased demand. They were acutely aware of the cost of sourcing, configuring, and maintaining geographic-redundant infrastructure to ensure optimum

application performance for customers worldwide.

Executives sought to maximize global sales opportunities through the company’s established monthly subscription pricing model. They saw an opportunity to shift from hosting the Figlo Platform in the company’s corporate data center to a cloud environment to gain scalability while trimming operating expenses.

SolutionIn late 2010, Figlo began evaluating cloud service providers. It previously used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to host the Figlo Platform for a customer in the United States. But developers found that the tools and processes for deploying applications to the Amazon cloud service required several manual, time-consuming steps.

Searching for an alternative, business and IT leaders evaluated Windows Azure, the Microsoft cloud services development, hosting, and management environment. “Because Windows Azure delivers true platform-as-a-service capabilities through a set of easy-to-use tools, it offers a much more complete solution for our business than alternative cloud technologies, including Amazon EC2,” says Brouwer.

In January 2011, the company began the process of moving the Figlo Platform to Windows Azure and Microsoft SQL Azure,

Partner: FigloWebsite: www.figlo.comPartner Size: 70Country or Region: NetherlandsIndustry: Financial services

Partner ProfileFiglo is an independent software vendor (ISV) that specializes in developing tools for personal finance management and financial planning.

Software and Services Windows Azure Platform− Windows Azure− Microsoft SQL Azure

Technologies− Microsoft Silverlight− Microsoft Surface

For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit: www.microsoft.com/casestudies

Windows Azure PlatformPartner Solution Case Study

ISV Speeds Deployment, Lowers Support Costs of Financial Services Application

the cloud-based relational database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technology. The Figlo Platform is built on the Microsoft ASP.NET web application framework and uses Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database management software. It also incorporates user interface components built on Microsoft Silverlight browser plug-in technology. Developers used Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio to complete the application conversion and testing processes in two weeks.

Since the release in early 2011 of the version of the Figlo Platform running on Windows Azure, the company has continued to deliver the solution as a subscription service. The company offers discounted pricing for large-volume multitenant deployments. Customers who require a single-tenant configuration pay a yearly hosting fee in addition to the base subscription price.

Figlo Platform customers include ABN AMRO, one of Europe’s largest banks with more than 90,000 employees. “Figlo has a reputation for its flexibility, quick time-to-market, and in-depth understanding of local financial regulations, which makes them a great global business partner,” says Johan Plas, Senior Product Manager for Financial Planning at ABN AMRO.

BenefitsBy migrating its flagship product to Windows Azure, which provides reliable on-demand scalability and performance through Microsoft data centers worldwide, Figlo is able to pursue geographic expansion beyond the Dutch market. It has also significantly reduced its operating costs and increased the speed at which it can deploy its Figlo Platform solution.

Accelerated Time-to-Market—Figlo was able to maximize opportunities for international growth by quickly setting up and delivering the Figlo Platform as a highly scalable cloud service. Thanks to its developers’ experience in creating solutions on the Microsoft .NET Framework and the ease of use of Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio, the company estimates that it was able to save more than two weeks in development time. “We completed all development and testing on the project in a couple of weeks, which meant we could

start capitalizing on sales opportunities in international markets ahead of our original schedule,” says Brouwer.

Savings of $22,000 per Application Instance—The company spends 10,000 euros (U.S.$14,700) annually per instance to host the Figlo Platform on Windows Azure. Previously, the company spent 25,000 euros (U.S.$36,700) annually per instance to maintain its own hosted server environment. As a result of moving its offering to Windows Azure, Figlo executives calculated a total savings of U.S.$22,000 per instance per year, which represents a 60 percent cost reduction.

Greater Business Agility—Figlo can now respond to customer needs in a more flexible way. For example, when a customer requires that the Figlo Platform is hosted using a single-tenant architecture, Figlo can set up a separate instance of the solution in Windows Azure and remotely configure all of the necessary compute and storage resources. “Customers no longer need to purchase their own servers and wait for us to get them set up in our data center,” says Brouwer. “With Windows Azure, we can tailor the configuration of the infrastructure to fit each customer’s exact needs and deploy our solution in minutes, rather than hours or days. We still operate on the same basic business model, but now we can get customers set up in less time, which means we can start realizing revenue faster.”

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Document published July 2011