Travelocity Critical System Runs on Windows Azure Cloud

This week the Microsoft TechEd North America conference is taking place in Atlanta Georgia. TechEd is an annual conference which provides IT professionals and developers with deep technical education across Microsoft’s current and upcoming products, solutions and services.

Taking into account the high level of interest in private and public cloud computing this year, the conference includes extensive information on how attendees can begin to take advantage of the cloud, partners supporting it, and customers who are already actively adopting the technology. Customers are turning to cloud computing for a variety of reasons such as the appealing economies of scale and the opportunities to improve the speed of innovation and application deployment.

One of the customers highlighted by Robert Wahbe, Corporate Vice President with Microsoft, during his keynote at TechEd and in his blog is Travelocity, a global online travel agency. Travelocity chose Microsoft’s public cloud solution, Windows Azure, to deploy their Java-based critical analytics system to the cloud in just two months. In the related news release, Dave Matthews, CTO at Travelocity, had the following to say:

“At Travelocity we work hard to understand our customers and make travel a quick and easy experience for them. We wanted the same for our transition to cloud computing, and the ability to quickly get new products to market, regardless of the platform, is an important advantage of Windows Azure, allowing us to easily move and deploy a core application to our business.”

You can hear more about why Travelocity chose Windows Azure and their experience building and deploying their application to the public cloud in the following
video:

There's also an extended length version of this video with more details available here.

In his blog post, Robert also covers a topic I’ve previously blogged about, which is the economics of cloud computing. He talks about the TCO benefits when deploying to a public cloud, such as Windows Azure, which are driven by the combined effect of scale, demand diversification and multi-tenancy. I urge you to check out the whitepaper if you haven’t previously to explore the potential benefits of cloud computing has for you and your business and the methodology behind the study.

To read more on the other announcements related to TechEd, such as partners supporting Microsoft’s cloud offerings, check out the news release and Robert’s blog post. If you have other questions or would like to find more information on what Microsoft has to offer businesses interested in cloud computing check out the Cloud Power site.

Thanks for your time and if you have questions or comments, please post them here and I’ll work to get back to you as soon as possible.

Thanks – Larry