Windows Azure Customer Solution Case Study Need logo Service Provider Holds the Line on Costs and Expands Its Business with the Cloud Overview Country or Region: United States Industry: Oil and Gas Customer Profile Fielding Systems provides innovative, cloud-based software solutions for midstream and upstream companies in the oil and gas industry. Based in Tampa, Florida, the company has 10 employees. Business Situation At Fielding Systems, business was booming, but so were the demands of running an in-house data center. Hosting the service applications internally was both costly and time-consuming. Solution The company migrated the product suite to Windows Azure. This helped the company focus on its core business while laying the groundwork for further expansion into new markets. Benefits Achieves cost-effective scalability Maintains application critical functions Builds on experience Reduces downtime by 50 percent Boosts availability worldwide “At Fielding Systems, everything we do is hosted on Windows Azure—SQL Database, SQL Reporting, Compute Instances, Service Bus, AppFabric—almost anything Windows Azure offers we use somewhere in our product offering.” Shawn Cutter, CEO, Fielding Systems When your job requires miles of driving over back roads to check on oil wells too numerous to count, getting an alert on your mobile phone directing you to specific outages or hotspots is technology at its best. Fielding Systems, which provides field operations software to the oil and gas industry, chose to run all of its manual and remote field data collection and data analysis services on Windows Azure. By moving to Windows Azure, Fielding Systems can refocus and expand its business at a lower cost, while retaining all of the unique features of the original applications.
model based on usage. Customers pay only for the number of fields, wells, or devices for which data collection, storage, and reporting activity are provided. Fielding Systems can offer this pricing model because it is able to control those same costs on the back end. Maintains Critical Application Functions For Fielding Systems, maintaining application functionality was a necessity. Centralized reports and automated workflows help make the solution what it is, and none of those features could be left behind. Having a single inventory of reports is part of a larger strategy that lets the company grow its customer base with few disruptions and minimal costs. Builds on Experience Having an equal footing in both technology and the oil and gas industry has allowed the company to draw from both foundations. Knowing how to use specific features to best advantage—such as which rendering formats work best on smaller devices, or how to optimize queries for fast performance—is almost as important as knowing what a report should contain and how information should be visualized. The ability to refine and iterate over the reports is simplified on Windows Azure because everything is stored in one central location. Reduces Downtime by 50 Percent The company wanted to offload hosting, but not at the expense of reliability. Since the migration, reliability has actually improved, cutting downtime by half in the first year. Boosts Availability Worldwide Having data centers around the world has opened up new ways to strengthen the business. The company is currently building out support for disaster recovery scenarios that include failover to other data centers in Europe and Asia. Looking ahead, Shawn Cutter is excited about upside potential of an international customer base. “While we are focused on the US market at this time, we get calls from companies located throughout the world. Windows Azure will give us the ability to tap those markets as the company grows and expands into other regions. Geo-replication and global scalability allows Fielding Systems to offer a platform that inherently supports something that a hosted system can’t natively support. By building a platform on Azure, we get this capability without further investment. “ Windows Azure With Windows Azure, you can quickly build, deploy, and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. You can build applications using any operating system, language, or tool. For more information, please visit . <<<