VANCOUVER, British Columbia,
May 1, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Global
content services and photography provider VRX Studios turned to
Microsoft's platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud platform, Windows
Azure, to replace its costly, unscalable, server-based digital
asset management system and, in the process, developed one of the
world's first 100 percent cloud-based digital asset management
systems. Built 100 percent from the ground up on Windows Azure,
MediaValet can scale to meet the needs of any size company, in any
industry, and is available on datacenters around the world. Today
MediaValet is a stand-alone service that is quickly gaining market
share in a 20-year-old, billion-dollar, global industry.
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"The moment we launched MediaValet, we were competing
head-to-head, on a global stage, with the largest digital asset
management software providers on the planet," said David MacLaren, founder and CEO of VRX Studios
and now of MediaValet. "Windows Azure enabled us to harness more
than a decade of experience in producing, managing, distributing
and licensing digital media to build an enterprise-class digital
asset management system — in less than 12 months — that can compete
with the best and biggest in the digital asset management
industry."
Windows Azure enables MediaValet to scale in real time to
accommodate its customers' daily storage, bandwidth and computing
requirements as well as easily and cost-effectively scale over time
to meet the company's long-term needs. Azure deployment eliminated
the formidable upfront investment and ongoing maintenance costs
faced by MediaValet in providing a digital asset management system
that is available on datacenters throughout North America, Europe and Asia
Pacific.
In considering their options, the MediaValet team contemplated
Amazon Web Services and Google Apps but found neither met their
needs. "We turned to Windows Azure because it gave us the tools,
the infrastructure and the support to solve our short- and
long-term business challenges," MacLaren said. "As a
platform-as-a-service cloud offering, Azure lets us focus all our
resources on building the solution we required and left building,
managing and maintaining the global infrastructure that we required
entirely up to Microsoft."
The VRX Studios team initially pitched their new digital asset
management system to travel and hospitality companies, which made
up the bulk of their customer list; however, the surprising range
of businesses calling for service estimates post-launch compelled
the team to expand their sales and marketing efforts to cover all
industries on all continents. With the realization that managing
digital assets had become a daunting challenge for companies of all
sizes all over the world, MacLaren decided to build a new team to
focus solely on this new opportunity. That new team became
MediaValet.
The scalability of Window Azure enabled MediaValet to meet the
needs of small regional companies with hundreds of gigabytes of
assets and a few dozen users all the way up to multinational
corporations with terabytes of assets and tens of thousands of
users. In addition to MediaValet's inherent scalability, Microsoft
Corp.'s global network of datacenters allowed MediaValet to offer
its digital asset management services on a global scale on the day
it launched, enabling real-time access to a company's digital
assets. Other key features that MediaValet inherited include triple
redundancy and geo-replication, which provides backup against
regional disasters or conflicts. All in all, Windows Azure helped
MediaValet launch a world-class digital asset management system in
half the time and for half the investment than was previously
possible.
"On day one we came to market with an industry-leading set of
features and benefits, delivered on a global scale, that no one
could match for the price," MacLaren said. "Before Azure, building
and launching such a system was practically impossible unless you
were heavily funded and had a massive IT team."
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide
leader in software, services and solutions that help people and
businesses realize their full potential.
SOURCE Microsoft Corp.