The needs of businesses and their app development teams are changing. It’s a mobile-first, cloud-first world driven by digital business. Companies are moving away from their reliance on custom legacy implementations in favor of a more diverse and flexible application portfolio. New partnerships are forming within companies between Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) as they aggressively seek new ways to collaborate to get the most out of existing investments and connect existing apps and services with new applications across devices. Marketing agencies and app developers are taking advantage of cloud offerings to help drive new business growth, innovation, and faster time to market. Cloud tools and infrastructure have become the new mandate for everyone seeking to deliver successful results quickly in a competitive market.

Delivering on this mandate requires easy-to-use rapid app development tools integrated with scalable infrastructure. Agile delivery is quickly becoming the norm for creating a stronger, more innovative bridges to the customers. Allowing developers to quickly build, test, and deploy software to deliver more new and unique customer experiences.

To this end, Microsoft recently introduced the Azure App Service to help companies develop intelligent and scalable web and mobile applications faster than ever before. Leading companies have taken notice and innovative app ideas are driving increased sales, faster time to market, and improved performance and reliability. We’ll look here at how three leading organizations with diverse business needs, Iberia Express, Hogarth, and Seattle Seahawks’ Russell Wilson’s russellwilson3.com are using Azure App Service to build stronger bridges with their customers that also improve their bottom line.

Iberia Express triples sales. The company tripled its direct sales through its website with Microsoft Azure and achieved a 50% reduction in development costs.

Hogarth delivered a scalable, global web application in record time for its client. Hogarth and its development subsidiary Cortex achieved nearly 60% faster time to market, scaled web site traffic and optimized in real-time to support demanding customer needs.

The Seahawks’ Russell Wilson achieved massive scalability and flexibility for web site that had to perform under pressure.