City of Mississauga Makes Strategic Technology Investment to Help Improve Service Delivery with Microsoft Software
Fast-growing Canadian municipality is helping to save time and licensing costs operating within a Microsoft SQL Server-based environment.
Mississauga, ON – February 6, 2008 - Microsoft Canada Co. announced today that the City of Mississauga is deploying Microsoft® software as a part of a strategic IT decision to deliver expanded services to its citizens. The municipality signed an Enterprise Agreement in 2007 which includes Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 to help enable its long term vision of simplification and standardization of its application, infrastructure and service management platform.
With a population of more than 695,000 residents, Mississauga represents Canada's sixth- largest and fastest growing major city. Mississauga’s eCity municipal website is an innovative community web portal that provides citizens with virtual, self-serve access to city hall 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Mississauga is a known focal point for commercial activity, and is home to 50 of Canada's Fortune 500 offices and more than 18,000 businesses within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The goal of the eCity initiative is to minimize the need for citizens to attend city hall physically in order to conduct business with the city.
The City previously operated within an Oracle and SAP-based database environment that, after a cost-benefit analysis based on the size of the municipality, was requiring too much time and investment to support and maintain. With a staff of 7,500, the municipality was looking for a scalable and cost-effective solution to help conserve IT resources, reduce the number of database servers and streamline information sharing between its various front-end and back-end applications to provide better insight into the information for its end users.
“We have a long-term strategy to upgrade our existing applications and implement new business service initiatives and we found that management of the Oracle environment we were operating in was a time-intensive process for our administrators,” said Rekha Jethva, Manager Planning & Integration, City of Mississauga Corporate Services Department. “We decided to migrate our SAP application from Oracle & UNIX to a new SQL Server-based environment and we have helped saved time spent on operational and administrative tasks and CPU in licensing costs. It is already proving to be a tremendous help in integrating the City's mission-critical applications and raising the level of continuous service we can deliver to our citizens.”
With advanced features such as 24-hour data processing and Business Intelligence (BI) reporting tools, the SQL Server 2005-powered system is helping the City consolidate its numerous databases, gain deeper business insight and deliver faster results on an enterprise-class data warehousing platform. The municipality also has plans to use the Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) capabilities of BizTalk® Server 2006 R2 to help seamlessly share real-time data and business processes within its various back-end systems and corporate departments.
“Microsoft strives to help Canadian municipalities such as Mississauga achieve more by taking advantage of the BI capabilities, scalability of its application platform tools like SQL Server and the other products that Mississauga has purchased, including BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and PerformancePoint™ Server 2007. Now, with a more manageable and integrated application platform in place, the City can better prepare for long-term growth via enhanced service delivery to the community,” said David McJannet, Senior Product Manager, SQL Server, Microsoft Canada. “We are pleased that the City of Mississauga has chosen the Microsoft-based application platform as an essential piece of its strategic vision to simplify and standardize its IT infrastructure.
About Microsoft Canada
Established in 1985, Microsoft Canada Co. is the Canadian subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq "MSFT"), the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. Microsoft Canada provides nationwide sales, marketing, consulting and local support services in both French and English. Microsoft Canada is headquartered in Mississauga, Ontario with MSN.CA offices located in Toronto and eight regional offices across the country. The company supports local communities across Canada by creating innovative technology and partnerships that help people realize their full potential.
