Case Study: Hearst Corporation achieves 80% faster time-to-market and 80% cost reduction with Microsoft Azure

Media Company Reduces Time-to-Market by 80 Percent with Cloud-Hosting Solution

Hearst Corporation, a major U.S. media company, needed to launch subscription-based premium content for mobile apps quickly and affordably while integrating disparate content management systems, a separate subscriber database, and the iTunes storefront. Facing a one-month deadline and tight media margins, Hearst required a reliable, scalable, and flexible solution that avoided slow hardware procurement and high hosting costs.

Working with Pariveda, Hearst built a token-based entitlement database on Microsoft Azure in about a month to orchestrate access between the app, CMSs, subscriber systems, and iTunes. The cloud PaaS approach cut time-to-market roughly 80% (instances deployed in under a day), reduced ongoing costs about 80% ($2K/month vs. an estimated $10K), sped updates and testing dramatically, and delivered high availability while using only about 25% of the capacity a traditional deployment would have required.

Hearst Corporation

Roberta Kowalishin

Vice President, Web Technology