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“We use Microsoft Azure to achieve tremendous value, scale, and efficiency for our enterprise customers. We‘re saving more of two things always in short supply at a startup: time and money—even compared to Amazon.“
Keith Puckett, CEO, BookedOut
Almost every startup hosts its technology in the cloud. But the smart ones do it in Microsoft Azure. Just ask BookedOut, which aims to deliver the “uberification” of freelancer engagement for advertising, marketing, and experiential agencies. With Azure, it saves US$250,000 and accelerates development by 30 percent. Now it’s eyeing Azure to mine data insights, which will make its platform even more valuable to its enterprise clients. A disruptive model for labor Keith Puckett believes the American Dream is still alive; it just needs some help. To provide that help, Puckett and his partners have built a cool startup with a business model so disruptive it could be the next Uber. To support their business, they decided to put their technology in the cloud, rather than buying a bunch of servers. But then they decided to do something that not all cool startups do. More on that in a moment. Puckett is the CEO of BookedOut, which has its sights set on the US labor market. Specifically, the startup is solving a critical engagement gap between advertising and marketing enterprises, and the highly evolving
professional freelancers in what it calls the event based “Gig Economy.” BookedOut targets the market for freelance and contract labor to staff the more than 75 million hours of brand marketing events—think trade shows, product launches, consumer marketing, large-‐scale sporting and entertainment events—held in the US every year. If the opportunity is huge, so is the labor pool pursuing it. Puckett says that by the year 2020, more than half the nation’s workforce will be freelance and contract labor, and that about 25 percent of them will be in marketing and advertising, many looking for event marketing work. No easy way to make a match Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of people
Cool startups head to the cloud. Cool, smart startups head to Azure. Just ask BookedOut.
Customer: BookedOut Website: www.bookedout.com Customer Size: 30 employees Country or Region: United States Industry: Professional services Customer Profile BookedOut, based in Chicago and operating throughout the US, is an accessible, trusted marketplace platform that connects enterprises with freelance service providers, facilitating opportunities for freelancers to pursue and work events with the world’s biggest brands. Software and Services n Microsoft Azure platform − Microsoft Azure Cloud Services
n Microsoft Visual Studio − Microsoft Visual Studio Online
n Technologies − Microsoft .NET Framework
For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit: www.microsoft.com/customers
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published April 2015
looking for a lot of work. “But, to date, there hasn’t been any easy or efficient way for advertising and marketing enterprises and freelancers to find each other,” according to Puckett. Market mechanisms haven’t existed to bring freelancers and employers together—at least, not on the scale that the market now requires. Puckett saw this for years working in the advertising and marketing industry in Chicago, where part of his responsibility was to create just such matchups for major corporations and agencies that wanted to hire freelancers to staff nationwide events. Every part of the process was manual, and most parts relied on phone calls and paper, including hiring, training, monitoring, managing, invoicing, and making payments. “It was a clumsy, inefficient market with tremendous logistics and management constraints,” says Puckett. “For both the freelancers and employers, the process required a level of touch that wouldn’t be tolerated in many other industries.” BookedOut is born Meanwhile, entrepreneurs in businesses as diverse as car services and property leasing were using groundbreaking technologies to disrupt hide-‐bound business models. Puckett and his partners saw it as the perfect opportunity to do the same in the market they knew best. In 2014, BookedOut was born. Through iOS and Android phone apps, freelancers can submit their information, images, and short videos to bid for event openings; book events; self-‐manage event logistics; check out; confirm hours worked; and get paid. BookedOut’s proprietary algorithms match freelancers to gigs, and event managers can review the results and easily assemble and manage their teams. After just one year, BookedOut already serves more than 40,000 freelancers and hundreds of major agencies and brands. According to Puckett, the efficiencies are remarkable. An event manager who might have spent weeks to assemble and manage a team for a series of
events can now complete the same tasks in a couple of hours—and likely end up with more appropriate freelancers working the events. Secret sauce on the back end If the mobile apps that front BookedOut are the sexy parts of the solution, the secret sauce is surely on the back end. While many startups opt to host their solutions on Amazon Web Services, BookedOut chose Microsoft Azure. More than that, BookedOut developed its platform in the Microsoft cloud using Visual Studio Online and the .NET Framework. “BookedOut uses Microsoft Azure to achieve tremendous value, scale, and efficiency for our enterprise customers,” says Puckett. “We‘re saving more of two things always in short supply at a startup: time and money—even compared to Amazon. That lets us focus 100 percent on solving business issues. And that’s the key to success for any early-‐stage, high-‐growth company that wants to expand quickly and continue unlocking tremendous value for enterprise customers.” Saves $250,000 As a startup, BookedOut participates in the Microsoft BizSpark program, which gives it free and low-‐cost access to Microsoft software and services including Azure, Visual Studio Online, and Microsoft Office. Andy Abbott, Executive Vice President of Engineering and Technology at BookedOut, says BizSpark saves the company about $100,000 in out-‐of-‐pocket cloud hosting costs. In addition, because Azure Cloud Services includes management services that BookedOut wouldn’t get if it hosted virtual machines on Amazon Web Services, he figures the company saves another $150,000 by not having to hire an engineer to manage the cloud infrastructure.
Speeds development by 30 percent Abbott says that Visual Studio Online and .NET Framework are ideal for a startup looking for fast, flexible development. He uses them to avoid infrastructure issues such as spinning up dev and test servers. He can also manage the
access of contract developers to code repositories as well as deploy code into production in minutes. “With Visual Studio Online and .NET, I save at least 30 percent of the time it would otherwise take to manage software development,” says Abbott. “That’s hours every week that I can spend on building better solutions.” Abbott also uses Microsoft technology to achieve goals traditionally associated with much bigger companies. When an enterprise client wanted to integrate its own system with BookedOut, Abbott needed to build an integration platform—fast. “The integration we did with Azure in a week looked like we’d had it in development for months,” he says. “We delivered the platform to the client in a highly professional way. I don’t know any other technology that delivers that functionality.”
Next up: Making its data more valuable That’s not the only Microsoft cloud functionality that Puckett and Abbott plan to use at BookedOut. They’re exploring Azure Machine Learning and Microsoft Power BI both to improve an already-‐efficient booking process and to give clients better insights into their BookedOut data. “We handle millions of transactions, and that gives us a tremendous amount of data from which to mine insights,” says Puckett. “Azure can help us to make our platform’s service even more valuable to our clients.”