Quark Brand Manager provides distributed sales and marketing teams the opportunity to easily create, customize and deliver brand-compliant marketing materials on-demand. Quark chose Windows Azure for this new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.

Marketing manager for Brand Manager Nick Howard and engineering manager Amit Nayar talk with ISV Architect Evangelist Bruce Kyle about how they chose Windows Azure.

Video Link: Brand Manager Goes Global in the Cloud on Windows Azure

The team describes several Azure features that are key to their choice.

• Windows Azure helps the scale the application to the right size, up when lots of jobs put big demands on the system, back when demand lessens.
• It provides global location
• Able to get to market quicker.
• More affordable for clients.

The team describes scaling as being able to meet the demands for multiple types of tenants and workloads. So with Azure, the meet the user demands for processing large print jobs, add new customers worldwide, and add users worldwide.

Amit describes how developers expand their current skill set, while learning how to build architecturally sound applications for the cloud. He says, "Developer wouldn't want me to take away Azure now. It just fits the way we want to do business."

Developers can quickly deploy, closing gap between their dev environment and production environment. Easy to replicate between the cloud and development computers. In addition, developers are able to quickly respond to changing needs, making them able to accept business deals that might have been more difficult to implement. Azure a familiar place to the developers.

Amit explains how Quark does continuous integration with the cloud.

About Brand Manager

Brand Manager helps provide marketing manager with ways to control how those inside and outside the organization use logos, printed material, and business marketing collateral. It provides a workflow for the approval process

• Create customized, brand-controlled marketing materials, produced by anyone, anywhere.
• Empower your distributed sales and marketing teams to create personalized and localized sales and marketing materials on-demand, in minutes.
• Collaborate with stakeholders — such as brand managers, agencies, and legal and subject matter experts — in the review and approval process.
• Maintain brand consistency and compliance with controlled elements such as colors, fonts, taglines, and logos.
• Increase efficiency with version control of customized documents so you don't have to waste time searching for the most recent version.
• Print at your convenience using your in-house printer, your preferred vendor or optionally with the Quark Brand Manager local print network for fast, convenient, cost-effective local printing.

Getting Started with Windows Azure

Windows Azure is an open cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.

• You can build applications using any language, tool or framework.
• Start with Developing on Windows Azure to get the tools for your particular environment.
• Get the latest Azure Developer Training Kit.

Bruce D. Kyle
ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation