More Data Can Only Mean One Thing...

If you remember back in June, I was very excited about Microsoft’s invitation to run JackBe’s Presto on Azure’s cloud. In true Mashup style, we quickly assembled the ‘Open Government Azure Mashup’ showcasing Mashups and Apps that connect to Microsoft’s data sources including SharePoint lists, OData-based unemployment information on Azure cloud, published using the Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) Toolkit, and Bing service.

We created a personalized dashboard on unemployment across the United States, assembling Apps and publishing these Apps as SharePoint webparts. Since then, the cloud continues its momentum with a strong emphasis on the value of an information ecosystem. The more relevant and valuable the information, the more valuable the resulting Apps and Dashboards can be.

We’ve always said ‘When Mashing your Enterprise, It Pays to have a lot of Friends’. But where will the cloud fit into this ecosystem? Well lucky for us, Microsoft has helped us answer this question by bringing a new dimension to the story with the recently announced ‘Azure DataMarket’. Azure DataMarket provides customers with a reliable, affordable set of data services, somewhat akin to companies like Xignite. Here’s how Microsoft describes the product on the Azure DataMarket website:

“The DataMarket section of Windows Azure Marketplace, formerly known as Codename Dallas, includes data, imagery, and real-time web services from leading commercial data providers and authoritative public data sources. Customers will have access to datasets such as demographic, environmental, financial, retail, weather and sports. DataMarket also includes visualizations and analytics to enable insight on top of data.”

And JackBe is working jointly with Microsoft to show just how powerful this approach can be. We recently worked in partnership to assemble a dynamic dashboard of Apps created from Azure DataMarket and other services. These Apps track a shipment of perishable food (we like to think of it as caviar) as it travels from warehouse to purchaser, incorporating location, weather, customer, and inventory information from different systems and services, all working together to ensure the shipment reaches its destination in time and that it stays fresh.



This collection of interrelated Apps also goes much further than just Microsoft’s Azure DataMarket. It incorporates many other Microsoft enterprise tools, including:

• Bing maps: with Navteq dynamic routing information and Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM on Demand customer data;
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM on Demand: customer order data, and real-time Weather Central information visualized in Microsoft Silverlight, this App also supports write-back capability to the Dynamics CRM;
• Microsoft SharePoint: aggregating information on delivery trucks and their locations;
• And from Azure Data Market services: dynamic fuel prices and geographically correlated fuel station locations.

We believe that seeing this disparate set of information in one single view so a company can accurately track their shipments based on changing conditions truly shows the value of a strong information ecosystem combined with a secure platform to quickly assemble and view live information. Yes we admit it, you can certainly do this today with existing applications but that includes toggling between 6-8 screens of information, raising the bar for mistakes and spending 20-30 minutes tracking each shipment. We see this everyday and we’ve learned from our customers just how inefficient this process really is. When any enterprise is faced with so many pieces of data in so many places, it can only mean one thing: they need a dynamic solution like this.

As I said earlier in the year, ‘it’s going to be a very hot Microsoft summer’. It looks like the heat will continue throughout 2010.