Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
“To have Microsoft choose a digital signage product as winner is great for our industry,” says Andreas Soupliotis, president and CEO of Ayuda Media Systems, Montreal.
Soupliotis was talking about Ayuda Splash’s win as Partner of the Year for its use of Azure, a Microsoft Windows product that, he says, Ayuda took a risk in using – and is happy that it did.
Each year, Microsoft recognizes innovation and excellence in the technology Partner community through the Microsoft Partner Network IMPACT Awards program.
“Microsoft choosing a digital signage product as Azure product of the year is a big story for digital signage on the cloud,” Soupliotis says. “Microsoft could have chosen so many other domains to win but they chose digital signage.
“Using Azure was a big deal for us,” says Soupliotis. “It was a controversial decision to go with Azure because it’s PAAS, Platform as a Service, as opposed to going with IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), It really meant a lot of work in that we had to rewrite our code, but it certainly has proved beneficial for our clients.
“With Azure, our Splash checks every few seconds to see if there’s a content change. If so, it pulls it immediately from the cloud and updates across the entire network of servers. We are programmatically tapping into the power of the cloud by using the Azure SDK.”
Prior to migrating to Windows Azure, Ayuda hosted and administered the Ayuda Platform on servers in a high-availability datacenter using an application service provider model.
“Prior to Azure, we managed our own virtualization extensively and when our SaaS clients used to demand more performance from our platform, we would have to physically visit our datacenter to increase resources such as installing more RAM or disk space or change CPUs,” says Pierre-Yves Troel, Ayuda’s chief software architect. “With Azure, we simply have to log into the Azure console and request more resources per instance by literally clicking ‘up’ or ‘down’ for more or less power. Our Ayuda Platform then elastically scales across Microsoft’s thousands of virtual servers and delivers storage and compute power on demand.”
The end result is that Ayuda’s clients experience a much more responsive product with incredibly high uptime and deep service level agreements.
“This is the next generation of what the cloud should be,” says Soupliotis.
Ayuda Media Systems has been providing the D/OOH industry with the world’s most sophisticated media operations management platform for 9 years. As the developers of The Ayuda Platform (which notably includes Juice™, Splash™, Zest™, and BMS™), the Ayuda Platform has invoiced over a billion dollars in OOH billing and provided media management functions for more than 300,000 advertising faces globally. The Ayuda Platform is cloud-based, and includes functionality for D/OOH networks such as avails and proposal generation, invoicing, lease payouts, financial reporting, inventory management, scheduling, content management, mapping, network monitoring, business intelligence, a free software player, proof of play and the world’s only D/OOH vendor focused CRM. Ayuda was founded in 2003 by ex-Microsoft employees with the mission of empowering the D/OOH industry with state-of-the-art tools that make D/OOH easier to manage and buy.
November 16th, 2012 at 11:28 @520
That’s great news. Congratulations to Ayuda. Looks like Windows Azure has some more exciting D/OOH related news to announce in the upcoming year.