Case Study: Active Fitness achieves a scalable, social mobile sports network connecting athletes and instructors with Microsoft Azure

Developer Uses Cloud Solution to Create Scalable, Social, Interactive Mobile Sports Applications

Summit Data Corp. (SDC), a 25-person developer of mobile, social, and cloud solutions, set out to expand into the fitness market by building highly interactive, social mobile apps for runners, skiers, and other athletes. The company needed a development approach that would support social features (friends, media, leaderboards), instructor connections, and the ability to scale from thousands to hundreds of thousands of users.

SDC used Windows Azure Mobile Services to build the Active Fitness Network and companion apps (Active Fitness, Winter Ski & Ride, Winter Sports), enabling activity tracking, media sharing, instructor access, and unified logins. The cloud-backed solution simplified development, supported peak events (about 18,000 downloads in one day) and claims capacity for tens of thousands of concurrent connections, and the network grew rapidly to roughly 200,000 users in 115 countries (about 250,000 users reported later).

Active Fitness

Mark Dorsey

Executive Director and CEO