LinkShare Develops Marketing Application with Microsoft Cloud
LinkShare is using Microsoft’s Cloud Services Platform to develop the next generation of online performance marketing application LinkShare Lightning.
This online performance marketing firm decided to use Windows Azure after evaluating the cloud computing offerings from Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine.
Microsoft claims its massively scalable and cost-effective cloud platform can enable customers to easily build, host and dynamically scale applications and services through the Microsoft data centers all across the world.
LinkShare expects annual savings of up to several million dollars in hardware, software and development costs by using Windows Azure and Microsoft SQL Azure.
These savings will enable the company to invest more in research, innovation and customer feature requests.
Commenting on the rationale of this strategic move, LinkShare said that they wanted to create a scalable solution that could handle peak holiday-season Internet traffic without investing in expensive IT infrastructure.
Developers used Windows Azure, Microsoft SQL Azure, SQL Server 2008 Enterprise and .NET Framework 4 to create a solution that is expected to handle over 1 billion impressions per day.
“Cloud innovation and feature development are proceeding at a fast pace at Microsoft, which made Windows Azure a great choice,” said James Chen, chief technology officer of LinkShare Labs. “With a steady stream of new Windows Azure development tools at its disposal, our team of three developers built LinkShare Lightning in just three months, putting us that much closer to our vision of a global, cloud-based, online performance marketing solution.”
“Retailers need an online performance marketing platform that can accommodate sudden changes in workload without the burden of costly management costs,” said Doug Hauger, general manager of the Cloud Infrastructure Services Product Management Group at Microsoft. “By leveraging the power of the Windows Azure platform, LinkShare is creating a scalable solution that can be easily customized to grow with the needs of its customers.”
By Anuradha Shukla
