THE CLOUD
28 April 2016
“So I asked Bill
[Gates] to do a
two-hour session
on the connected
consumer in
2006, and we did
something like $50
or $60m in revenue
on the back of this
meeting, which
was unplanned.”
Peter Proud, Cortex
CMS used to do the editing and delivery but we’ve broken it apart so the
delivery is done from a very scalable
cloud infrastructure and you just hook
the editing capability into it.”
AFTER WORKING at a senior level
For the Microsoft Education
for Accenture, Proud then decided to
site, which spans 120 pages, Cortex
go it alone. With Cortex, he has sunk
developers used the ingest tool they
£3m of investment into the company
had created to suck in all the existing
– some of it his own, plus investment
content on November 22nd last year,
from WPP – bringing in Microsoft
and ‘re-platformed’ it four weeks later.
consultants (who else?), and has based
So how good is Azure, as an enterprise
his business on the Microsoft Azure
delivery system?
platform. He is in the process of trying
“It’s awesome,” says Proud. “Mito get a patent for the “rock solid”
crosoft have got it so right. They are
platform, which can build websites in
going to do so well. What we’ve done
around three minutes.
is really unique as well – we’ve given
“We’ve turned the whole way the
global, local capability, so all of the
industry works on its head. Everybody
stuff that is controlled from the centre
starts by building the CMS (content
is bolted down and controlled centrally
management system) and tries to
from Seattle (headers, footers, main/
build on top of it – but they’re not very
core products etc) and then the local
scalable, they’re not very secure, and
subs have got access to control things
kind of clumsy, so we’ve just taken that
locally.”
element out and used Azure websites,
The technol