Over the past few months, I’ve had the privilege of working with some very smart and energetic people at the Tribune on an initiative to consolidate their content into a single repository running in the cloud. What made this project particularly intriguing is that Tribune was entrusting their most valuable asset, their content, to Windows Azure and this commitment to our platform is held in high regard with us here at Microsoft. So, what problem was Tribune trying to solve and how were they solving it? Well, answer these questions is the very purpose of this post.

About the Tribune

Firstly, a little bit of information about the Tribune to set some context. Tribune (or Tribune Company) is a major player in the media and publishing industry – they operate eight newspapers, including the LA Times and Chicago Tribune, as well as 23 television stations through WGN, and a variety of news and information websites through Tribune Interactive. 

The Challenge

The company has been operating since the mid-1800’s and has been a trusted source for news in local markets and enjoyed great success over the decades. However, their strengths is local news has also had it’s drawbacks – for many years, their various newspapers have operated as independent entities that have created and managed their own content in a silo. The net result was that Tribune was managing 32 separate data centers, with a total of 4,000 servers and 75,000 feet of raised-floor space that was dedicated to supporting and cooling those servers. It also maintained 2,000 software applications that were not consistent from newspaper to newspaper or television station to television station.

In recent years, a major shift has taken place in the newspaper industry - more and more people have been consuming their news online and for free, and this has resulted in a stagnating subscriber base and with that a shift in advertising spend from traditional media to new media. Tribune has not been immune to these industry developments and this trend has put extraordinary pressure on cost reduction and where better to reduce costs than with the eliminations of redundancy and inefficiency.

Another challenge that Tribune faces is the sheer face of innovation and consumer demand – to compete in a digital world, where news would break in the blogosphere and through social media channels, Tribune had to be able tap into this ecosystem and respond to consumer demand as news would break.

The Solution

As they say, necessity breeds invention and there’s a certain  courage garnered from having one’s back to a wall that lends itself to take bold steps to address a critical challenge. Facing the inertia of an established organization, Tribune’s CTO, Steve Gable, impressed me with his vision and fortitude to make tough decisions to prepare Tribune for for a new (digital) future. In 2008, well before the hype of cloud computing, Steve envisioned a content repository that could be accessed from any location, at any time, in any manner, by any device, and by any one affiliated to Tribune.

Immediately, it struck me that Steve’s vision aligned very well with the vision we had for Windows Azure, but we had just begun embarking on the development of this platform and given the importance of the asset in question, namely their content, we had to be sure that Azure could handle the load and live up to it’s promise.

Steve assigned two of his smartest developers, Jerry Schulist and Ryan McKenzie, to take on the challenge and they quickly developed a working prototypes. The only challenge that they faced was with the sheer amount of data that had to be transported and stored in Windows Azure Storage – roughly 100GB a day. All this content also had to be index and searched, so this dynamic duo took on the task of integrating FAST into the solution so that the content could be discovered. After working with with my colleagues Wade Wegner and George Huey through some latency issues between Tribune’s data centers, they were set to go.

Pretty impressive, if you consider this all took place in just a few weeks  and this is really a testament to the speed to market benefits of Azure. It’s also pretty impressive that when you look at the volume of data being processed and stored, the cost to Tribune is just a few hundred dollars. Even better yet, this solution was put in place with nearly ZERO capital expenditure and Steve has effectively been able to consolidate his  data centers to two owned and operated by Tribune, and Windows Azure.

Finally…

It always gives me pleasure to see the great work our customers do showcased at various Microsoft events. This week, Tribune was highlighted in Bob Muglia’s keynote address at TechEd 2010 and a number of folks throughout Microsoft highlight the great works these folks have done with press and analyst interviews as well as other events.

It’s been a pleasure to work with Steve and his great team (Denise, Jerry and Ryan) – these folks rock! We are looking forward to many great things coming out of this partnership in the coming months and years as Tribune embarks on a new era for their company.

If you wish to learn more about this partnership, please read the case study at  http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudyid=4000007519