After I mentioned the Curtin University Live@edu case study yesterday, somebody from Curtin sent me a link to the Microsoft video we'd produced on their wider use of our Cloud services. They're using Live@edu for student email, and they're also using Windows Azure to develop inhouse applications. In the example they are using Windows Azure to deliver their iPortfolio system to 47,000 students.

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(You can also view the video on the Cloud Power website)

Peter Nikoletatos, CIO at Curtin University talks in the video about what they have done, and why they have done it. For example, towards the end he says:

  We've begun rethinking our whole bespoke development platform and using Azure as the way we're going to deliver corporate applications, in a scalable architecture that could grow as our product suite grew. One of the best benefits of moving to the cloud, was that as our partners grow the product suite, these are transparent to the end user. We don't need to schedule large maintenance windows to do updates. Universities are no longer focused on managing large data centres. We don't want to invest in architectures that will be come obsolete or cost us way to much to maintain. We know that the environment is going to change rapidly to meet the expectations of the next generation of students.  

It reminded me about they early days when I was learning about Windows Azure, when I'd assumed it was something that our partners would use to develop applications for education customers to use. It was only after a few months that I realised it was also perfect for bigger education customers with their own development teams - like universities - to change their model for internal application development too - because they got the same benefits of reduced application deployment time, minimal capital expenditure, and massive scalability.