As part of the Real World Windows Azure interview series, I talked to Rajasekar Shanmugam, Chief Technology Officer at
AppPoint, about using
Windows Azure for its cloud-based process automation and systems integration services. Here’s what he had to say.
Himanshu Kumar Singh: Tell me about AppPoint.
Rajasekar Shanmugam: AppPoint is an independent software vendor and we provide process automation and system integration services to enterprises. At the core of our solutions is a business-application infrastructure with a unique model-driven development environment to help simplify the development process. We originally developed our platform on Microsoft products and technologies, including the .NET Framework 4 and SQL Server 2008 data management software.
HKS: What led you to consider a move to the cloud?
RS: We traditionally used our platform to develop solutions that were deployed on-premises at customer locations, but we started seeing interest from our customers for cloud-based computing solutions. In fact, several of our customers had previously deployed AppPoint solutions by using third-party hosting providers, but with limited success. Some of these customers who attempt cloud-based deployment struggle to integrate the solution with their enterprise resource planning [ERP] systems and still have to invest in additional software for virtual machines and don’t get the benefits of true cloud computing.
HKS: Tell me about the move to the cloud with Windows Azure.
RS: To meet customer demand for cloud-based process automation solutions, we developed a version of our existing business process automation platform, called
AppsOnAzure, on Windows Azure. Windows Azure was the obvious choice for our platform, which is already built on the .NET Framework and offers a complete end-to-end architecture.
HKS: Can you tell me about a customer using AppsOnAzure?
RS: Yes,
Biocon is a prominent biotechnology company in India that earned revenues of approximately U.S.$516 million in 2010. As part of its manufacturing process, Biocon manages artwork for drug labels, leaflets, and packages, which is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration and involves multiple stakeholders and approval cycles. This artwork management process was manual, time-consuming and sometimes error-prone, which led to expensive product recalls. To help speed the artwork process and minimize error-prone processes, Biocon turned to us for a cloud-based solution.
HKS: How did AppsOnAzure help Biocon?
RS: We used AppsOnAzure to develop an automated artwork management system for Biocon in only eight weeks. This system automates and controls the entire artwork life cycle process, from concept to product and eliminates the paper-based approach. Biocon employees can upload documents and files, which are processed through worker roles in Windows Azure and stored in Blob Storage. Biocon uses SQL Azure to store its relational data, including product information for the drugs it manufactures. We also implemented Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus to connect to Microsoft Dynamics, the on-premises ERP system that Biocon uses.
HKS: Is AppsOnAzure useful for other companies?
RS: Yes, There has been tremendous change in mind set, where customers are moving their LOB/Business critical apps onto cloud. Though above solution was developed for Biocon, we’ve found that the solution is relevant across a variety of industries and we already have several customers evaluating the solution. We license the solution on an unlimited-user basis, and customers can either sign up for Windows Azure themselves, paying for hosting and storage on a per-use basis directly with Microsoft, or they can choose to have AppPoint manage instances of Windows Azure for them and pay a flat-rate monthly subscription fee.
HKS: What are some of the benefits you’ve seen from using Windows Azure?
RS: We’ve already seen some dramatic benefits as a result of our move to Windows Azure. The first is speed to market: the development process is so straightforward with Windows Azure that we expect to have 20 more cloud-based process automation solutions ready for customers to evaluate in less than eight months. This faster time to market coupled with less investment in infrastructure also lowers customer barriers to adoption, which has led to more companies evaluating a move to the cloud with us.
And as a Microsoft Partner, we receive ongoing support from Microsoft, which helps the us reach new customers. While some customers embrace the cloud, other customers can be more hesitant without proper education about the cloud-computing model. Being part of the Microsoft partner community and working with the Windows Azure Incubation sales team to help educate customers on the benefits of cloud computing has a tremendous influence on our ability to tap into new markets.
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other companies are using Windows Azure.
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statement. “The coloring is completely cosmetic, adding nothing to the flavor of the product. During the chemical analyses, CSPI collected samples of Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, Dr Pepper, Diet Dr Pepper, and Whole Foods 365 Cola from Washington D.C.-area stores. The group said Pepsi's products had 145- to 153-micrograms (mcg of 4-MI in two 12-ounce cans, while Coca-Cola had between 142- to 146- mcg per 12 ounces in the samples. The state of California has a 29-microgram limit for 4-MI, and drinks that exceed this number may be required to bear a warning notice. CSPI estimates that Coke and Pepsi products have caused about 15,000 cancers in the U.S. "If companies can make brown food coloring that is carcinogen-free, the industry should use that," Jacobson said. "And industry seems to be moving in that direction. Otherwise, the FDA needs to protect consumers from this risk by banning the coloring.” CSPI said the FDA has an exception for contaminants of food additives if it only causes a risk of one cancer in one million people. However, even Dr. Pepper and Diet Dr. Pepper having low levels of 4-MI, about 10 mcg per 12 ounces, pose a cancer risk of seven in one million. "Colorings made with the ammonia or ammonia-sulfite process contain carcinogens and don’t belong in the food supply," Jacobson said. "In any event, they shouldn’t be obscured by such an innocuous-sounding name as ‘caramel coloring." --- On the Net:
"No one gets a pass on food safety, in my mind, I don't care if you're the biggest farm in the world, or the smallest" said Merrigan, in response to a question from Food Safety News. "We all have to achieve very high levels of food safety. Secretary Tom Vilsack said one of his first meetings, if not his first meeting, with the president was talking about the importance of food safety. So this White House and this administration takes food safety very seriously."
"But there are different ways of getting there," said Merrigan. "One of the things that we funded through the Risk Management Agency was working with FamilyFarmed.org -- it's one of many things that we've done -- and what they did was they developed a food safety planning tool."
The tool, part of
FamilyFarmed.org's On-Farm Food Safety Project, is the first of its kind that has a broad range of input and expertise -- from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to trade groups to ag extension specialists. It is aimed at helping small- and mid-sized farmers to achieve Good Agricultural Practices (GAP harmonized standards and certification to help ensure fruits and vegetables are produced, handled and stored in the safest manner possible.
"It's free to farmers," said Merrigan. "So you can go on to the website... and it'll ask you questions, kind of like TurboTax, if you've every used TurboTax in tax filing season. It asks you particular questions and at the end you hit print and you get your food safety plan.
"We are doing a lot, I think, to help small farmers. If you're vending into a school or farm-to-institution situation, or even if you're direct to farmer's market, of course you want to have high levels of food safety," added Merrigan. "We're trying to develop tools to help people out."
The USDA Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, which coordinates existing resources within the department, unveiled
a digital map last week, known as The Compass, that visually maps out USDA local and regional food projects.
The White House event was the epicenter of a virtual conversation, otherwise known as a "tweetup," because it was mostly hosted on Twitter. The conversation can be viewed by searching for the hashtag #KYF2 at Twitter.com.
Derek Soberal has had his share of run-ins with police as a documentarian and protestor, but he’s still fighting
Features
Eric Mark Do — The Eyeopener (Ryerson University
TORONTO (CUP — Derek Soberal stands along a police barrier with a crowd in Nathan Phillips Square. It's a part of a January protest against Toronto budget cuts. Holding a small camera, he films the scene as tension grows between the protestors and police.
The situation erupts as a protestor attempts to break through the line. In the ensuing chaos, a police officer knocks Soberal’s camera down and punches him in the face before stomping on the camera.
However, when Soberal crosses the police barrier attempting to retrieve his camera, he is arrested and charged with unlawful assembly, mischief and two counts of obstructing a police officer.
A photo in the
Toronto Sun
shows Soberal in handcuffs, bruised and bloody. He quotes Martin Luther King in rationalizing why he went over the police barrier to retrieve his camera, containing potential evidence of the alleged assault: “I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”
Snowballing
Soberal has gone from being unable to recite his phone number without stuttering to being a prominent voice of the Toronto protest scene, featured on the CBC’s
Lang and O’Leary Exchange
and credited in a G20 edition of
The Fifth Estate
. He also created an activist-based YouTube channel, TheSecretStore, with over 5,000 subscribers and 3.5 million upload views, as well as the 35,000-member Occupy Canada Facebook page.
But January’s budget protest was not Soberal’s first run-in with Toronto police. His life as an activist and citizen journalist started with the 2010 G20 protests and Ryerson’s now-defunct CKLN radio station’s Word of Mouth Wednesday program.
“Basically, I got involved because of the G20 summit,” says Soberal. “That was my first protest … and I exercised my rights at that time. I got invited onto the show by [host] Daniel Libby to talk about the experience.”
He would become a regular on Libby’s show, eventually earning the title of CKLN programmer.
“Derek is attracted to media attention,” says Libby. “He’s not afraid to talk to reporters when they’re around.”
His ability to speak on the radio and communicate with the media is a hard-earned skill — from the time he was a toddler until his teens, Soberal underwent speech therapy. Today, he speaks with near-perfect clarity, pausing occasionally if his stutter starts to creep back in.
He says this ability to speak publicly is inspired by Libby.
“[Libby] was confident on the radio, and my voice was cracking the first time,” Soberal says. “I learned from him.”
Exposure
Through the radio show, the pair promoted
Toronto G20 Exposed
, a documentary produced by Soberal. The film highlights questionable police actions during the G20 weekend, and premiered at the Student Campus Centre on Gould Street as part of the Ryerson Student Union’s Xpressions Against Oppression week.
One scene in the documentary shows security footage from Soberal’s condominium, a block away from Ryerson, about two months after the G20 protests. As he tells it, Soberal noticed a police car across the street with its lights off, so he approached the officer and asked a few questions.
After saying goodbye, the police officer then drove away and came back, accusing him of loitering and forcefully pushing him. After running from the officer who pushed him, Soberal was detained by as many as 12 officers who seem to come out of nowhere. He also claims that while they searched him, they were calling him a drug addict, an alcoholic and mentally unstable.
“My cell phone and iPad were getting searched,” he recalls. Though he was eventually released without charge, he felt it was a message. “I felt like I was being targeted … I felt like it was a threat; I felt intimidated.”
Toronto G20 Exposed
was used as a source for
The Fifth Estate’s
episode "You Should Have Stayed At Home", with Soberal given special thanks in the credits. When the Occupy Wall Street movement was happening, Soberal created the Facebook page “Occupy Canada.”
That prompted a producer from the CBC to contact him to be interviewed on the
Lang and O’Leary Exchange
. Soberal appeared on the show on Oct. 14: the eve of mass demonstrations worldwide, including Occupy Toronto. Day three of those protests was also day one of Social Justice Week at Ryerson, and Occupy Toronto was invited to join the campus for a rally. However, some Ryerson students wondered what message that sends.
“Occupy Toronto was an illegal activity — I don’t think Ryerson or the students’ union should get involved in that,” says Mark Single, a fourth-year student in industrial engineering. Single has run for RSU president multiple times against the activism-heavy Students United platform in an attempt to focus Ryerson’s finances on education.
Academic Activism
But Ryerson does have institutionalized connections to activism. The university’s Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy is mandated to “create a hub of interaction between social justice activists and academics at Ryerson University.” Current chairholder Winnie Ng acknowledges the divide between the law and the protests, but says social justice is still important.
“I think the message is quite clear that Ryerson as a campus is supportive in increasingly diverse strategies of organizing,” she says. “It was most appropriate for us to kick off Social Justice Week with Occupy Toronto on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.”
Single says he’s against any university promoting activism on campus, because an educational institution shouldn’t have political values. “Ryerson is a university; Ryerson’s role is to teach students,” he says.
“Ryerson has zero interest. It’s not part of the student’s contract with the university to have students engaging [in activism].”
Sandy Hudson, Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario, says otherwise. “Our whole purpose is education and innovation, essentially changing our world and making it better — everything that we do is moving forward our society,” says Hudson.
“Why wouldn’t we, as students, use that time to use what we’re learning to practically change our world? I actually think it’s integral to the learning process.”
Divide
The divide among students’ views of campus activism is highly visible right now in Montreal, where students staged a sit-in at the McGill University administration building. Another group of students, upset with the demonstration, created an event on Facebook called "The James 6th Floor occupiers do NOT represent me." More than 2,100 students have signed up so far.
The McGill sit-in was the subject of a recent episode of CBC Radio’s
The Current
, in which Single talks about his distaste for student sit-ins, protests and marches. He says he has a problem with it when it infringes on others’ rights and takes up extra costs in order to accommodate the protest. But Soberal sees it as a necessary cost to incur.
“Everybody has the right to freely think what they want, but at the end of the day we are all individuals, and sometimes traffic is stopped because it’s not business as usual,” says Soberal. “There’s something that needs to be brought to the public attention. It creates spark, awareness … sometimes you have to create attention to make it an issue.”
But Single doesn’t buy into the idea that activism, like Occupy Toronto or the G20 protest, actually gets anything done. “If you want to make a difference in this world, go to school, become successful, become wealthy, and then use your wealth as a philanthropist, like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett,” says Single. “They’re billionaires and making significant change in the world … because they’re successful academically. Marching and protesting isn’t really making a difference.”
Ng says students should look beyond their texts and assignments to bring their educational process into broader political, ecological, and social contexts to become more critical thinkers. “For example, I could just hit my books and be the best that I can be in my field, but how does that relate and transcend to the rest of society?” asks Ng. “How does excelling in what I’m doing having an impact in the larger community?"
She sees the post-secondary community as essential to social change. “To me, that’s the essence of learning, critical reflection, something that’s down deep in your core, there’s some sense of core values,” she says. “So for me building a society that’s more caring and more just, we need more people to act when those core values are violated.”
Risk
Though he never actually attended Ryerson, Soberal continues to be involved with many of the same causes as student activists.
“We are all a part of the change that we want to see,” says Soberal. “I think university activism and community activism are all connected. What a great way to start, in university, to stand behind something you believe in, to create networks and communities and make a difference.”
He says he may be taking action against the Toronto police, but not until his trial for the camera incident is over. Soberal’s father Richard found out about the arrest from a friend. “I was pretty disturbed … I turned on the TV and they kept replaying it,” he says. “They showed him in handcuffs and bringing him into city hall. That upset me.” Four people were arrested at the rally, but only Soberal was detained overnight. Richard says he thinks they purposefully kept Soberal because he had been in the public eye as part of protest movements.
Soberal was raised near the intersections of Jane Street and Finch Avenue West, an area with an unsavoury reputation.
“I mean, when we were living there, you had to stick up for yourself,” recalls Richard. “You couldn’t run away from anything because the kids would be on your back. [Derek] got in some fights and that, but you know, it was just normal stuff.”
Soberal says the experience was formative and helped make him who he is. “Growing up in Jane and Finch was a great place — it creates adversity, but it creates character,” he says. “And that’s my home.”
“Moving down here now, down here is just the center of everything, ‘the big city.’ If he was living outside the city, I don’t think he would be involved like he is,” says Soberal’s father. Arguably, he’s more concerned for his son now than when they lived at Jane and Finch.
“Personally, I told him to back off [the activism] for a while and that’s the way I feel now,” he says. "I’m proud of him for what he’s doing, he’s putting in a lot of effort and he knows what he’s talking about, but I’m just scared that something bad is going to happen to him.”
Richard is especially concerned because Derek’s brother Shawn passed away in 2009 at the age of 33. The family has not disclosed the circumstances involved in Shawn’s death. “I lost one son and I don’t want to lose another,” Richard says. “As a father, I’m just worried.”
But Soberal has no plans on stopping. He’s still filming and editing videos, and still strongly believes in activism and citizen journalism. He wears his brother’s jacket when he attends protests, saying he feels protected by it. “I think everyone has to recognize that we have the freedom of assembly and the freedom of speech and we must exercise all of it,” says Soberal.
“We have voices, we gotta speak out; we have bodies, we gotta stand up," he says. “It’s about being there for something that you stand behind. We have a climate in Canada where it’s winter and a lot of people can’t get out. We’re hoping for a Canadian Spring.”
-30-
Joshua Thompson, a Michigan resident, is taking his local AMC theatre to court over charges for sweets and soft drinks
A filmgoer in Detroit is
suing his local cinema over the excessive prices he says it charges for snacks.
Security technician Joshua Thompson hopes to convince a judge that his local AMC theatre in Livonia, a city within the Detroit metropolitan area, is breaking state consumer protection laws. He has filed a class-action suit at the Wayne County circuit court in southern Michigan asking for affected filmgoers to be refunded and calls for the cinema to be hit with a civil penalty.
"He got tired of being taken advantage of," Kerry Morgan, Thompson's lawyer, told the Detroit Free Press. "It's hard to justify prices that are three and four times higher than anywhere else."
Thompson says he paid $8 for a Coke and a packet of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts at the Livonia AMC cinema on Boxing Day last year, nearly three times the $2.73 he would have been charged for the same snacks at a nearby fast-food restaurant and drug store. He said he used to take his own snacks into the cinema to avoid paying high prices, but was forced to stop when staff put up a notice stating that the practice was banned.
American Multi Cinema, which operates the AMC in Livonia, have not yet responded, but legal experts told the Press they did not expect Thompson's suit to succeed because licensed venues are exempt from consumer laws in Michigan.
His case is just the latest bizarre attempt by a US filmgoer to secure compensation through the courts in the wake of a bad cinema experience. In October 2011,
Sarah Deming sued the distributor of critically acclaimed Ryan Gosling thriller
Drive – as well as the cinema where she saw it – claiming the film was publicised as a
Fast and Furious-style action piece but turned out to be nothing of the sort.
In her suit, which was filed at the sixth judicial circuit court in Oakland, Michigan, Deming said the Nicolas Winding Refn film "bore very little similarity to a chase, or race action film ... having very little driving in the motion picture".
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