India: Indiaplaza.com, a pioneer in Indian online shopping space adopts Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform to meet the growing traffic on their e-commerce portal. Windows Azure’s ability to scale as per demand, combined with other business critical features like high availability, resiliency to hardware failures, ability to upgrade applications without downtime helped Indiaplaza.com to quickly make a decision in favour of cloud versus on-premise deployment.. Windows Azure helps Indiaplaza.com run the application on the latest versions of the cloud platform through automatic upgrade of Compute/database versions along with patches and updates, enabling Indiaplaza.com to focus on its core business of selling online versus the need to manage a large and complex IT environment.

Post the adoption of Windows Azure, Indiaplaza.com can easily manage the high traffic on its portal and smooth buy/sell of various products. On an average, thousands of paying customers shop on the portal daily and many more browse through various categories of the website in search of a particular product. Witnessing the increase in online shopping trend in India, the company is expecting exponential growth in the near future.

Srikanth Karnakota, Director, Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft India said, “Indiaplaza.com is one of the largest e-commerce players which has adopted Windows Azure cloud platform for meeting its demand of the growing customer base. This platform will ensure smooth customer experience and will strengthen its position in the e-commerce industry. The capability to scale-up and scale-down as per the requirement makes Windows Azure platform the best solution”.

K Vaitheeswaran, Founder & CEO, Indiaplaza.com, said, Since 1999, when we started India’s first online shopping site, we have been using Microsoft applications for our business. When we observed scalability challenges on our site given the rapid increase in traffic and transactions, we decided to move to Cloud Computing and it was an easy decision to opt for Windows Azure. We are now ready to welcome millions of shoppers to Indiaplaza.com without any worries.

Prior to zeroing down upon Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform, IndiaPlaza evaluated a number of local hosters and cloud service providers but was not convinced on their ability to scale up to demand at a very short time interval (in minutes), manage infrastructure seamlessly, provide redundant storage and disaster recovery capabilities and finally chose Windows Azure which met all their requirements at a very low cost. Windows Azure is the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. It provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manages web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.