To drive continued growth, Plante Moran, a leading U.S.–based financial services firm, needed to automate business development efforts. The company sought to replace its IBM Lotus Notes contact management system with an easy-to-use customer relationship management system built on a flexible, scalable platform. After evaluating a number of packaged solutions, Plante Moran chose Microsoft Dynamics® CRM based on its intuitive interface, powerful built-in toolset, and integration with line-of-business systems and productivity applications. Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Ascentium helped Plante Moran tailor the solution to automate key business functions, such as its client acceptance process. Since deploying the solution to 1,600 consultants, Plante Moran has strengthened its business development efforts and gained the agility to pursue strategic growth initiatives.

Genea provides energy management solutions to commercial property owners. Its Building Optimization Platform provides visibility into and control over energy consumption from the point of demand through billing for property managers and tenants. When it decided to create a Web-enabled, hosted version of its solution, Genea chose to use the Windows® 7 operating system for its performance, security features, scalability, and built-in Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 technology, along with Windows Server® 2008 R2 Enterprise for high availability. Genea noted that key software components of its solution run 35 percent faster on Windows 7 than on previous operating systems. The company is streamlining management of the Building Optimization Platform through enhanced remote access capabilities, while delivering a highly reliable solution that can handle large transaction volumes.

United Kingdom–based Aviva wanted to rationalise the number of software management systems in line with the company’s aims of reduced IT costs and greater effectiveness. With Microsoft® Services Premier Support and a designated Technical Account Manager (TAM), Aviva deployed Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 across its network in a timely manner. Today, the company has reduced IT costs and continues to drive efficiencies with the help of its TAM.

The Track and Trace Solutions Department of 3M, a Fortune 500 company, provides radio frequency identification (RFID) solutions. One such solution is the 3M™ RFID System, which is used by nearly 1,000 libraries and other facilities. To ensure customers can easily transition to and quickly benefit from the Windows® 7 operating system, 3M recently migrated its library RFID applications from Windows Vista® to run on Windows 7. The applications have nearly 2 million lines of code, yet it took just two days to verify the migration results—and no modifications to the applications were needed. As a result, 3M has noted enhanced security and reliability, and application performance improvements of up to 30 percent. Library patrons and staff should realize enhanced ease of use and productivity, strong support services, and simple deployments.

Sopima, creator of an online solution for managing business contract life cycles, needed to minimize its capital investment to deliver a viable offering. It also wanted to offer an affordable monthly subscription service to gain new customers quickly. Using the Windows Azure™ platform, the company hosts its application in Microsoft® data centers, providing customers with fast response times and high scalability. With the solution, Sopima has limited its investment in infrastructure and can focus on development rather than hardware administration. Sopima estimates that, without the Windows Azure platform, it would have had to hire additional full-time staff members at an annual cost of approximately U.S.$500,000. Its status as a Microsoft Partner will lend Sopima credibility in a competitive marketplace.

Tradeslot specializes in designing and building large scale business-to-business and government-to-business (G2B) auctions platforms; its partner company, Adslot, uses the same auction platform to auction online advertising space. The companies use computation-heavy combinatorial auction algorithms to manage their complex conditional bid processes. However, with a lack of compute power with its existing infrastructure, the companies found it necessary to manually add constraints to auctions. Tradeslot and Adslot implemented Windows Azure™ and, as a result, reduced capital costs for customers—from U.S.$60,000 to only $1,000 for each customer, improved their ability to scale up and improve services for customers, saved critical IT resources, and delivered a solution their customers can trust.

The Associated Press (AP) is the world’s largest news organization, with bureaus in 97 countries. On average, more than half the world’s population sees news from AP on a given day. AP wanted to broaden its reach by encouraging developers to incorporate AP content into their applications. Using the Microsoft-hosted Windows Azure™ platform, AP created a highly scalable solution that simplifies capacity planning and creates new business opportunities.

New Zealand–based TicketDirect International has grown into a major ticketing service for venues in Australia and New Zealand. The company’s focus on excellent customer service led it to look for a better way to handle peak system loads during major event ticket sales. Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Intergen, TicketDirect has begun redesigning its system to work from a “cloud computing” environment using the Windows Azure™ platform. The company is rebuilding its customer application as a Windows Azure application and migrating its data to a Microsoft SQL Azure™ database. By moving to a cloud solution, TicketDirect is able to easily and cost-efficiently scale its computing resources in response to real-time demand while simultaneously giving up the cost of maintaining its own hardware. This move frees IT resources to focus on more customer-centered needs.

Advanced Telemetry helps businesses monitor and control energy usage both on-premises and remotely with its EcoView system and EcoView Web application. The company has experienced tremendous growth, encouraging it to reexamine the scalability of its computing architecture. To reduce costs, increase scalability, and improve service, Advanced Telemetry is using the Windows Azure™ platform for hosted application and data storage, plus the Visual WebGui application platform from Microsoft® Registered Partner Gizmox to provide rapid development and run-time efficiencies for cloud applications. Advanced Telemetry developers have been able to use existing programming skills and experience with Microsoft development tools to migrate to Windows Azure. This saves the company money, improves functionality, and enables it to easily scale its computing resources to keep up with its rapid growth.

Microsoft IT runs an online auction to raise funds for United Way during Microsoft’s annual Giving Campaign. Employees donate and bid on items throughout the campaign using an online auction tool created by Microsoft IT. In the last Giving Campaign, Microsoft IT migrated the auction tool to the Windows Azure™ platform so that the tool could scale to meet the demands of campaign traffic.