One of the world’s largest professional services organizations, with a worldwide network of independent firms, needed a global IT infrastructure—without a global-sized price tag. The solution: a private cloud infrastructure built on Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Pack 1. The organization is now building that infrastructure, with Windows Server deployed into preproduction. The organization anticipates speeding IT management processes, gaining fuller and faster scalability, increasing reliability, and reducing costs.

Calibre Real Estate is a fast growing company, requiring even faster technology upgrades. Founder and Principal Alice Hagen realised that continually investing in and maintaining her own ICT was a poor business model. Each new server cost around A$30,000 and would need to be upgraded again in just a few years. Instead of buying another expensive server, Hagen decided to move the company to cloud computing. Impressed by its reliability, stability, back-up services and excellent reputation with other larger firms, Hagen made the switch to Microsoft Office 365 through their partner Telstra. The company now has on the go access to Exchange, Lync and SharePoint enabling seamless communication, collaboration and document sharing.

The Xerox India Development Center (IDC) writes software for customers all over the world, including many Xerox groups. The geographical distance between IDC and its customers and the lack of modern development tools made it difficult for IDC developers to deliver quality code and fix problems quickly. IDC upgraded to Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate 2012 and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 to gain a modern development platform. It then upgraded to Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 to virtualize and replicate production environments and integrate workload monitoring with development tools. The result has been a dramatic improvement in developer efficiency, software quality, and problem resolution times. Because developers are happier, staff attrition has dropped from 29 percent to 10 percent in two years.

The existing server infrastructure at Ashok Leyland was being underutilized and becoming obsolete. The company wanted to decrease the number of physical servers and consolidate resources without compromising on business services. After evaluating several virtualization technologies, Ashok Leyland chose to consolidate and build their new private cloud with Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 R2 Hyper-V technology. As a result, the company plans to cut down the number of physical servers and make it simpler and easier to manage the data centers. Costs will be substantially lower because the need for hardware is much lower and similarly, power and maintenance costs will come down significantly. Overall, Ashok Leyland’s new IT infrastructure will assist in providing better IT services and boost business agility.

To succeed in the car rental business, you need low prices and great service. In many locations, customers can walk 10 paces to find the same car or a better deal. Europcar South Africa understands this well and has discovered that the secret to delivering superior pricing and service is having cutting-edge technology in the data center. The company recently created a private cloud environment—using the Windows Server 2012 operating system, Microsoft System Center 2012 data center solutions, and Dell hardware—to keep operating costs low and deliver new services quickly. Europcar estimates that it has boosted IT efficiency by more than 85 percent and reduced operating costs by 35 percent, which includes a 25 percent reduction in data center energy costs. It has also compressed disaster recovery from two hours to 15 minutes.

CSU Industries provides critical maintenance services to Fortune 500 businesses. It recently upgraded to the Windows Server 2012 operating system to take advantage of innovations that enable the provider to deliver uninterrupted service to customers, significantly trim administration time, and reduce IT costs by 50 percent. CSU also gained increased business agility and created a cloud foundation on which it can offer new revenue-producing services.

For Avanade, the Accenture/Microsoft joint venture that provides business technology solutions and managed services, it is not enough to use the latest Microsoft technologies to run its business. It also has to demonstrate compelling expertise in those technologies to win new business. The company saw the chance to do both with the release of Windows Server 2012, Microsoft System Center 2012, and Windows 8. Avanade created an innovative way to deploy Windows 8 worldwide, using Windows Azure, and then used the new software to give remote workers faster, easier, and more secure corporate access. Additionally, the company’s mission-critical Dynamic Computing Services—which runs a private cloud environment for development and testing solutions for internal and external customers—uses the technologies to gain the cost-effective scalability necessary to support a large and growing business.

The IT department at ING Bank wants to implement a private cloud infrastructure as part of its data center consolidation efforts, and prepare for changes to its core banking system. The bank deployed Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V and, as a result, will be able to reduce licensing costs and aid its consolidation effort to reduce the number of data centers from 16 to 2. In addition, the IT department will increase its agility and responsiveness to business needs.

GAD is a data processor and IT service provider that serves 430 commercial and retail banks in Western Europe. In addition to its centrally located data center, GAD manages on-premises servers at the banks. To improve application access, the company decided to bring all servers into the data center where they would need to be virtualized. However, previous virtualization attempts with domain controllers had proved faulty. GAD joined the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program for Windows Server 2012 and will deploy 560 Hyper-V hosts running 7,000 virtual machines, while moving to a private cloud model. As a result, GAD is improving customer access to critical applications, reducing downtime associated with server maintenance, and increasing revenue opportunities by developing a valuable infrastructure-as-a-service offering.

ING DIRECT Australia is an online bank that competes against much larger banks. To spend more on innovation, it has to continually trim operating costs. To help its IT operation deliver savings to the business, ING DIRECT is upgrading to the Windows Server 2012 operating system and Microsoft System Center 2012. By taking advantage of the increased virtualization density and IT management efficiencies that this software makes possible, ING DIRECT will improve IT efficiency by 20 percent in the near term and double or triple server consolidation levels and savings in the future. It can also extend high availability to more workloads by using replication and live-migration features built into Windows Server 2012. ING DIRECT can better secure its data centers with Windows Server 2012 and give its IT staff a rewarding job environment by letting them work with the latest technology.