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.

RiskMetrics Group’s Risk Management Business delivers risk management services to the world’s leading asset managers, banks, and institutions to help them measure and model complex financial instruments. To meet increasing market demand for risk analysis, RiskMetrics needed to accommodate increasing peak loads on its computing infrastructure for specific periods of time. The company used the Windows Azure™ platform—an Internet-scale services platform hosted in Microsoft® data centers—to provide on-demand computing capacity for its analytics applications. Now RiskMetrics can complement its on-premises capabilities with a flexible, reliable solution that can support bursts in computing activity over short periods of time, deliver enhanced services for more customers, empower innovation, and provide the company with increased business agility.

Banca IFIS wanted to speed up its batch processing to meet an increase in customer demand for services. The bank worked with its partner Teamlab to migrate its existing Electronic Credit Line Management application to the Windows® HPC Server 2008 operating system. Doing so helped the bank reduce its batch-processing times by 75 percent, ensure high availability, and avoid purchasing additional hardware to accommodate the heightened demand.

The leading credit bureau of Brazil, SERASA Experian has 3,000 employees and provides credit validation services to businesses and consumers. In a business that relies completely on IT, the company made the strategic decision to take advantage of Microsoft Services Premier Support to move to proactive IT operations and gain control over its environment. Since taking advantage of this managed support offering from Microsoft, SERASA Experian has followed a path of infrastructure optimization, moving from Basic to Rationalized and reallocating 90 percent of its support hours—of which 90 percent once went to solving issues—to proactive services and new IT initiatives. In addition, the company has achieved 99.99 percent availability for a range of mission-critical systems and continues to plan strategically alongside Microsoft to roll out new technology to its business.

Minnesota-based Security-Victor Insurance needed to replace its aging server hardware. When considering a new solution, the agency decided to improve its disaster recovery capability and simplify server management. After consulting with Mytech Partners, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, Security-Victor deployed Windows Server® 2008 R2 Foundation. At the same time, it moved its e-mail system to Microsoft Exchange Online, managing the authentication and access for both the e-mail service and a hosted proprietary application with the new operating system. Now, the agency has a reliable server solution that improves disaster recovery and lowers costs. Along with ease of installation and management, Windows Server 2008 R2 Foundation offers the right-sized solution for the agency today and an easy upgrade path as the business grows.

Financial services firm Baker Tilly is one of the first businesses to deploy a solution based on the Windows® 7 desktop operating system on a companywide basis. Baker Tilly expects to reduce labor of ongoing IT tasks and help keep IT resources focused on high-value functions. Benefits include direct IT cost savings averaging £116 (U.S.$191)/PC/year, made possible by improved network access, automated deployment, desktop management tools, and PC power cost savings. Windows 7 helps ensure that company fee-earners are affected less by common desktop update and support tasks. The business benefits have potential to recover more than two days of billable time for each mobile worker, representing an estimated £425 (U.S.$700)/PC/year in additional value. The potential value of this business benefit is the equivalent of about one-half of one percent of the company’s current annual gross revenue.

Bank of America, one of the world’s foremost financial institutions, provides its services through 6,100 retail banking offices and nearly 18,500 ATMs. For its 300,000 employees, e-mail is a business-critical communication channel. Through 2009, Bank of America has successfully maintained 99.999 percent availability for its employees, but with growing demand on an aging infrastructure, it faced memory and performance issues that it needed to address before they started to affect operations. In August 2009, Bank of America joined the Microsoft® Rapid Deployment Program and deployed a pilot of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 to evaluate how to improve its messaging environment. After deploying the pilot, Bank of America found that it would be able to perform administrative tasks more efficiently, increase service to its internal lines of business, and reduce costs.

BGC Partners, a provider of voice and electronic brokerage services, had an e-mail environment that could not easily scale to support expansion and did not provide adequate flexibility. In addition, exponential growth in the volume of e-mail messages and data created performance, stability, and storage issues. To address these challenges, BGC deployed Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010. By doing so, the company was able to replace the storage area network (SAN) that supported its e-mail system with lower cost direct-attached storage. The new solution improves system flexibility, performance, and stability. As a result, BGC has increased IT administrators’ productivity by up to 30 percent and reduced the time required to recover from system outages by 50 percent. BGC was also able to reallocate the existing SAN and avoid spending U.S.$1 million on SAN infrastructure for other projects.

Kaczmarski Inkasso is a leading collection services company in Poland, with internationally known clients like PepsiCo and Nestle. Wholly dependent on its messaging system, Kaczmarski Inkasso was growing frustrated with slow response time for users, 10-hour daily backups, too much downtime, and rising storage costs. When it learned about Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010, Kaczmarski Inkasso became an early adopter so it could test the software’s high-availability and performance improvements and its enhanced user productivity features. After deploying the solution to 150 pilot users, Kaczmarski Inkasso can now restore failed systems without downtime and has reduced backup time by 80 percent, saving IT staff 40 hours a week. Also, users no longer wait minutes for public folders to open. The company plans to double users’ mailbox size while taking advantage of lower cost storage.

As one of the largest private banks in Turkey with 421 branch offices, DenizBank was finding its decentralized messaging solution difficult to manage. The bank’s backup, archiving, and disaster recovery plans varied from branch to branch, making it difficult for the bank to scale its systems to accommodate projected growth. Upon learning about new features in Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010, the longtime Microsoft customer was eager to evaluate the software and became an early adopter in March 2009. Since deploying the solution to a pilot group of 150 users, DenizBank has increased system availability, simplified management, and improved the user experience for employees, especially when researching transactions. The bank can provide high availability with fewer servers, and it expects to save up to 60 percent on future storage costs.