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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
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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
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