LinkShare Chooses the Windows Azure Platform in Bid for Global Cloud Solution

Online performance marketing firm LinkShare Corp. announced today that it is using the Windows Azure platform for development of LinkShare Lightning, the next generation of its online performance marketing application. LinkShare made the choice after assessing the cloud computing offerings from Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine.

Using Windows Azure and Microsoft SQL Azure, LinkShare expects annual savings of up to several million dollars in hardware, software and development costs, allowing it to allocate more resources than before to research, innovation and customer feature requests.

“Cloud innovation and feature development are proceeding at a fast pace at Microsoft, which made Windows Azure a great choice,” said James Chen, chief technology officer of LinkShare Labs. “With a steady stream of new Windows Azure development tools at its disposal, our team of three developers built LinkShare Lightning in just three months, putting us that much closer to our vision of a global, cloud-based, online performance marketing solution.”

LinkShare needed to create a solution that would easily scale to handle peak holiday-season Internet traffic without requiring the costly investment in IT infrastructure. Using Windows Azure, Microsoft SQL Azure, SQL Server 2008 Enterprise and .NET Framework 4, developers created a solution that they predict will easily handle more than 1 billion impressions per day.

“Retailers need an online performance marketing platform that can accommodate sudden changes in workload without the burden of costly management costs,” said Doug Hauger, general manager of the Cloud Infrastructure Services Product Management Group at Microsoft. “By leveraging the power of the Windows Azure platform, LinkShare is creating a scalable solution that can be easily customized to grow with the needs of its customers.”

More information about LinkShare’s use of the Windows Azure platform is available athttp://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000008989.

More information about Windows Azure is available at http://www.WindowsAzure.com, and more information on Microsoft SQL Azure is available at http://www.SQLAzure.com.