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ChannelSight creates technology that helps leading global brands increase sales by simplifying the customer’s shopping experience. Since it launched its services in 2013, the rapidly growing Irish company has won global contracts in multiple industries and is now providing service in more than 30 countries.

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Research revealed that approximately 54 percent of visitors to a manufacturer’s website intend to buy, but only 8 percent of that group purchase. If a straightforward route to purchase is not laid out, customers quickly look to a competitor’s site.

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John Beckett,CEO of ChannelSight

“The brand has a bad experience because it has lost a sale, and consumers have a poor

experience because they’ve wasteda lot of time hunting, and ultimately

haven’t bought what theyoriginally wanted.”

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The ChannelSightsolution is a data feed with stock and price information for a specific product, country and language. A brand utilising the ChannelSight service can call the feed for any product to see where it is in stock and can be purchased. The feed delivers a ‘Buy It Now’ button, which links directly to a retailer site where the consumer can make a purchase.

ChannelSight customers are typically manufacturers or brands. Companies that manufacture products and sell indirectly. Manufacturers may also sell directly; but they can augment their direct sales by providing the ChannelSight direct links, as consumers may already have a preferred retailer and may not wish to sign up with a manufacturer site to make a purchase.

In creating ChannelSight, Beckett, Dundon and O’Gorman wanted to avoid some of the pitfalls faced by other tech companies that are tackling this issue. Instead of relying on retailers for data feeds that may be incorrect or out-of-date, the ChannelSight founders designed a web crawler to gather current product information from online stores, and automatically return the aggregated results to consumers. The company recognised that a cloud solution was the only viable option to meet its goals.

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Kieran Dundon,CIO at ChannelSight

“We needed to be able to deploy and scale multiple web roles as quickly as possible, and then crawl each page to check stock and prices at least 10 times a day, and to do that, we needed a powerful, elastic platform.”

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ChannelSight was born from a bespoke development company called Eirtight, founded by John Beckett and Kieran Dundon. As Eirtight developed almost entirely in the cloud, ChannelSight was conceived as a cloud solution from day one. The decisions were mainly around which cloud provider and which cloud elements they would rely on to build out their platform.

Having used it for multiple projects, they were very familiar with Azure. Given the importance of choosing the right solution, they reviewed other cloud platforms to ensure due diligence across the market offerings. They found that, “the Azure offering of Platform as a Service (PaaS)was more complete and more mature than anything else available”.

To make building the platform faster, they needed a platform that could scale indefinitely with the PaaS building blocks. They wanted a platform hosting partner that they were confident was innovative and was continuing to advance their product offerings. Three years on, ChannelSight claim that they are now happier than ever with their choice. Azure has advanced not only its core offering, but has added an incredible volume of new PaaS services.

“We are particularly delighted with Microsoft’s embrace of the open source community.”

By adding open source solutions from Hadoop to Docker, to mention just two, Azure is capable of hosting almost any combination of disciplines in order to provide optimum solutions.

The Challenge

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ChannelSight considered several options before choosing Microsoft Azure PaaS. “We looked at Amazon Web Services, but we realised that we wouldn’t get the PaaS platform that we’d get from Microsoft Azure,” says Dundon.

“For example, with Microsoft Azure we’d have the benefits of auto-scaling and load balancing, multiple storage options, and everything we needed to build our solution more quickly and easily than we could on a virtual machine.”

WhyChannelSightChoseAzure

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ChannelSight uses Microsoft Azure Cloud Services for Web and Worker roles, SQL Azure Database, Azure VMs, Azure Web Apps, Azure Storage for Tables, Queues and BLOB storage, Redis Cache, Azure Data Factory, Azure Functions, Azure API Management, Azure Scheduler, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Active Directory, Azure Operational insights and are exploring Azure HDInsight service for predictive analytics.

Working with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 development system, the Microsoft C# development tool, and Microsoft ASP.NET, ChannelSight created its Buy Flow technology, which is deployed as a plug-in on brand product pages. When consumers click the ‘Buy Now’ graphic, links are displayed to the specific product pages on retail partner websites. The streamlined process is driven by complex algorithms that match and validate data across multiple retailers’ websites using product codes, images, and textual product descriptions.

In May 2013, ChannelSight won its first major contract with a leading global electronics manufacturer in a competitive pilot with three other companies plus the established incumbent. “Winning this contract was a real coup for us as an early-stage business, because we effectively displaced not only the incumbent, but all of the established competition,” says Beckett.

“So that validated not only our initial instinct to build this product, but also the Microsoft Azure technology behind it.”

Next, ChannelSight wants to integrate Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and point-of-sale systems with its application so that it can direct consumers to both online and brick-and-mortar stores.

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The Azure platform has dedicated support professionals, which are highly responsive and experts in quickly finding problems, or helping guide development teams to ensure they make optimum use of the Azure elements. ChannelSight contend that the local team here in Dublin have been very supportive and responsive, and have always been available when needed to guide and advise.

How Did Microsoft Help?

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Dundon shares:

“The benefits from using Azure are many. At a high level, the comfort I get as CTO from knowing that my platform is hosted on such a reliable global hosting infrastructure is huge. I get to sleep well at night!”

He further outlines:

“The additional benefits are around the PaaS elements. Being able to select components such as Queues, where we know they are world class, instead of building our own has resulted in faster development time and more robust and scalable components.”

ChannelSight are aiming towards a micro services architecture with continuous deployment, and Azure is perfect for this.

Dundon highlights:

“Deploying has been made so simple. We can deploy to staging with a click. We then test, and once testing is completed, we simply click to switch VIPs and we’ve deployed to production. In the event of a problem, we simply switch back. Also, we don’t need to keep staging resources in play until required, which means reduced costs.”

“Using Azure allows us to focus on development and literally almost forget about hosting. The PaaS components allow us to speed up delivery by not having to build out the plumbing,” he adds.

The Results

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