The Standard Life Assurance Company of Canada is a leading provider of insurance, savings, investment and pension products. To improve IT operations and service delivery, Standard Life sought to enhance its network management and audit compliance capabilities. The company worked with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Itergy and upgraded to Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007 and Microsoft® System Center Configuration Manager 2007. The Windows®-based management solutions functions as an integral part of Standard Life’s new IT environment. With the System Center-based platform in place, Standard Life is improving infrastructure and server management – helping to reduce overall complexity and boost productivity.

Vancity, Canada’s largest credit union, needed to increase efficiency. The credit union turned to technology to support its efforts and opted to standardize on Microsoft® technologies because of their usability and value. By upgrading its Microsoft license agreement to the Enterprise Client Access License Suite, Vancity obtained a business productivity infrastructure that provides collaboration and communication in a cost-effective manner. For instance, the credit union uses Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to share electronic documents, reducing paper consumption and making it easy for employees to quickly find the information that they need to serve members. Thanks to its efforts, Vancity can not only better contribute to its environmental sustainability goals, but it also has been able to offer more IT services without incurring additional costs.

Vancity Credit Union wanted a better way to search its intranet, so it worked with the Habañero Consulting Group to replace its Google Search Appliance with an Enterprise Search solution based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. The organization now has the ability to fine-tune searches for more accurate, relevant results, and users are finding the information that they need more quickly and serving customers better.

Based in Toronto, Canada, BMO Capital Markets is the North American corporate and investment banking division of BMO Financial Group. With 400 servers distributed worldwide, BMO Capital Markets wanted to create a dynamic IT infrastructure that could easily scale to meet increasing demands for performance and international expansion. The company is upgrading its IT environment to 64-bit technology and will be deploying Windows Server® 2008 after February 2008. Based on results generated by using Windows Server 2008 in production and testing environments, BMO Capital Markets expects the remote access and application publishing capabilities of Windows Server 2008, along with enhanced server consolidation and better monitoring, to reduce physical server hardware requirements by 30 percent and save hundreds of thousands of dollars.

CGI Insurance Business Services (CGI IBS) focuses on delivering world-class services to the insurance industry across North America. CGI IBS was looking to streamline an already-successful proposal generation process. By implementing components of the 2007 Microsoft® Office system, CGI IBS aims to facilitate and accelerate its proposal development process, which is based on a worldwide delivery model involving cross-functional and geographically diverse teams and, sometimes, external partners. To improve proposal management and collaboration for multiple individuals from across the globe, CGI IBS implemented Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. The company expects to reduce costs and improve efficiency in its proposal generation cycle.

As part of a global government strategy to improve online services offered to the public, as well as an internal goal to increase customer satisfaction and improve productivity, the Ministry of Revenue Quebec (MRQ) decided to build a new electronic service delivery platform. After evaluating solutions from vendors such as IBM and Oracle, MRQ chose the Microsoft® .NET Framework, a component of the Microsoft Windows® operating system, and the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2002 development system because of the power, flexibility, and open architecture the technology offers. By using .NET technologies, the MRQ was one of the first fiscal administrations in North America to offer a complete set of online services for businesses and was able to increase the number and functionality of its online services, as well as help improve customer satisfaction and productivity.