REDMOND , Wash. — May 29 , 2012 — Microsoft Corp. has announced the Herbalife Ltd. Inc. decision to host its global distributors’ websites on Windows Azure. The nutrition company is now offering its independent distributors the option to create custom retail websites to help them expand their businesses. By building the website platform on Windows Azure, Herbalife substantially reduced its time to market, eliminated the need for significant capital investment and made it possible for the company to react to changing capacity demands in real time.

Herbalife wanted to give its distributors in more than 80 countries the opportunity to build customized retail experiences for shoppers. However, the costs needed to support the creation of individual websites for its distributors worldwide would have been massive if Herbalife had taken on all the work: licensing, obtaining hardware and constructing datacenters. Herbalife wanted to roll out this offering slowly to ensure that it had the features distributors needed. However, the company also required an infrastructure with the flexibility to rapidly scale across markets once the base offering was in place: attempting to do both without the cloud would have introduced significant risk.

Herbalife turned to the cloud to find a solution. Herbalife discovered that Windows Azure provided both flexibility and cost efficiencies needed to help it meet its business goals and now has the scalability and flexibility it needs, with Herbalife independent distributors on track to launch a projected 100,000 retail websites within the first three years of deployment.

“Herbalife was able to use its existing Microsoft ASP.NET expertise and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate tools to create the cloud-based website platform it wanted,” said Doug Hauger, general manager, Windows Azure, Microsoft Corp. “This kind of global consistency will help keep Herbalife’s independent distributors on the forefront of retail website strategies.”

More information is available on the Microsoft Customer Spotlight newsroom.

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