Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 13 | Page 82

/////////////////////////////////////////// INDUSTRY WATCH came highly recommended by MCIT, which financed this project and co-managed it with ERTU. Management was especially impressed with the capabilities and cost- effectiveness of Azure. Azure was also the perfect antidote to one underlying problem of being a government enterprise: procuring new hardware and licenses can take months. Azure changes all that. “Now, when they finish a project they don’t have to procure anything, they can portal, receives encoded content from a big number of radio and television channels for thousands of concurrent users with inclusive protocols and video formats, with around- the-clock monitoring. The cost of Link Datacenter encoding services was seven times less than that of a previously recommended provider. The development, staging and live production environments were consolidated, deployed and hosted on Azure, backed INSTEAD OF MONTHS THIS PROJECT TOOK JUST A FEW WEEKS, BECAUSE OF AZURE’S HANDLING OF OPEN SOURCE. be on air the next day,” says El Attar. “Azure for us was really magic, because we don’t have to wait for nine months just for the procedure and the bureaucracy of buying through the government processes.” by Azure Site Recovery. The set-up, security, performance and back-up of the entire infrastructure is managed by Link Datacenter, which is also acting as second- tier support for the entire project. ERTU and MCIT chose sister Egyptian companies Link Datacenter (LDC) and Link Development to consolidate and manage the complex infrastructure on Azure and develop critical solution components. LDC is known regionally for its experience in cloud solutions, particularly Azure, and Link Development is a global, award-winning Microsoft developer of business solutions and digital services across the Middle East. The result is a custom video-on-demand (VOD) platform that acts as a back end. Together with the portal, the platform receives encoded content from radio and television channels for thousands of concurrent users with inclusive protocols and video formats, with round-the-clock monitoring. And although El Attar admits to reservations in general about open source solutions, he speaks highly of how well this one was managed by Azure. LDC’s proposed solution was an open source, hybrid architecture that used ERTU’s IBM WebSphere portal with IBM DB2 as a database back end; Red Hat Enterprise Linux, on demand, as the operating system; and many Azure network services, such as Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN), Azure Media Streaming and Azure Traffic Manager. Platform security is provided by Palo Alto Networks and Barracuda Networks. The Link Development team concluded the journey with developing a custom video on demand (VOD) platform. The platform acts as a backend that, together with the 82 INTELLIGENTCIO “Instead of months this project took just a few weeks, because of Azure’s handling of open source,” says El Attar. “It was because we did testing on Azure as well. We planned it with Azure in place from day one, so it was not disruptive.” The ERTU portal isn’t new: ERTU had several small websites using various different technologies and content management systems. The idea was to make all these scattered websites into a unified portal with the same look and feel and with the same technology, support and hosting. The updated portal features: • A TV section that contains the main pages for ERTU’s TV channels • A radio section that contains the main pages for 10 radio channels • A news section that offers such standard news websites as BBC and CNN • A magazine section • An educational section for official materials from the Ministry of Education • A complete on-demand library for radio and TV offerings • A press centre for news about ERTU Before this solution, ERTU struggled with on-line streaming stability and had difficulty managing the level of quality. Now, the broadcaster has stable AV streaming and can use the VOD capabilities of Microsoft Azure. ERTU audiences can now use a single portal with all the services in one place. ERTU management and El Attar believe the project was successful because the vendors and the partners involved acted as one team. Managers are especially happy with Azure, because there is no bottleneck in its resource availability which means required resources are available to cover peaks or unexpected business needs. “Our digital economy is growing strongly,” says El Attar. “The government is undertaking critical digital transformation initiatives across the board. We have succeeded in affecting a disruptive change in ERTU with the help of the Link family (ERTU’s managed service and development partners), who refreshed a complex infrastructure from scratch and implemented new mission-critical solutions. Now running on Azure, ERTU can roll out new media services and products anytime through Internet, smartphones and tablets. Link Datacenter impressed us with digital mastery on Azure, proactiveness and flexibility in managing customer needs and innovation in the face of technical challenges. “It went perfectly well because we instituted a collaborative model,” said El Attar. “So I don’t care who is the technology provider, who is the hosting www.intelligentcio.com