Are you a mobile entrepreneur? How do you leverage Azure for your business?

YourStory recently caught up with Sandeep Alur, Lead Evangelist at Microsoft India, to understand how Windows Azure Mobile Services can help entrepreneurs. Below are the edited excerpts of the conversation:Azure’s core offerings

Windows Azure Mobile Services is the quickest way one can build a service backend for an app. This goes along with the philosophy of focusing on what the app does functionally contrary to how to make it happen from an infrastructure standpoint. As an entrepreneur, by embracing Azure Mobile Services, one can worry less about technical enablement and focus more on GTM strategies. In today’s world dominated by devices, consumers have the luxury of choosing a device of their choice. In this context, for an app publisher, it is a must to cater to broad array of consumers who intend to use the app (services) from a device of their choice. Here is where the key value proposition of Azure Mobile Service is realized. Azure Mobile Services enables a common façade to be built that can be leveraged across variety of consumer end-points as in Windows 8, iOS, Windows Phone 8, Android, HTML5 & JavaScript.

Differentiator

Considering there are other players in the market who provide similar services, our biggest differentiator is the level of automation in how quickly a common service façade can be positioned, which compliments GTM. From a strategy perspective, it is critical how quickly one can reach out to consumers.

Benefits

The current decade is dominated by the explosion of devices and the services which light them up. Indian entrepreneurs who wish to take their services to their target audience (consumers) in a timely fashion should consider leveraging Azure Mobile Services. If one has to stay competitive, they need to worry less about the aspects related to infrastructure, hosting, scale out and other elements. Azure Mobile Services strikes a balance in providing a technology infrastructure and ease of enabling consumer end points to solutions.

Customer Testimonial

We also caught up with redBus, one of the customers, to talk about Azure’s impact on their business, “Azure Mobile Services powers redBus’s popular Bus Buddy notifications feature. Let’s say, the traveler’s bus is delayed, they get near-real time notification on the location of the bus and expected ETA. This feature also shares customer tips (push msg) like how is food on the bus or a carry a charger based on the bus operator. The features increases brand loyalty to redBus apps. Azure mobile Services are powering Windows apps today and it has the potential to power other platforms in the future which will make the service more maintainable across devices and platforms for redBus engineering teams. Azure Mobile Services reduces a lot of effort required for communicating between the app and the database. Their notification service was easy to plug into our existing backend system,” adds Shashaank Shekhar Singhal, Senior Product Manager, redBus.

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