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.

Origin Digital, a video application service provider, wanted to increase transcoding throughput without increasing capital expense. To gain dynamic scalability within a familiar development environment, the company built an innovative transcoding application called Cloudcoder on the Windows Azure™ platform. The application will reduce compute costs and database administration time as well as expedite moves into new geographic markets.

Two decades ago Quark changed the course of traditional publishing with its QuarkXPress® desktop publishing software. Today the company provides publishing solutions to customers around the world across multiple channels. To reach more customers in the huge but fragmented small-to-midsize business market Quark wanted to offer a service combining the flexibility of Web-based computing and the richness of PC-based software. It used the Windows® Azure™ platform and Microsoft® development tools to create Quark Promote, a service through which customers use professionally designed templates to create customized marketing materials that can be picked up at a neighborhood printer or received by mail. The service lets Quark tap into the Web-to-print market, helps business partners increase revenues, and provides customers with an easy, affordable way to create high-quality marketing materials.

Based in the United Kingdom, Betfair is the world’s biggest online betting community. To address issues with an aging operating system, such as system performance lags that negatively impacted employee productivity, the company decided to migrate to the Windows® 7 and Windows Server® 2008 R2 operating systems. Still early in its deployment, Betfair has increased system performance, improved user experience, and streamlined IT management.

Research Director, Inc. (RDI), one of the largest radio-research consulting firms in the United States, produces large, complex presentations that provide radio-audience data for its customers once every quarter. Faced with demands to respond to more data and drastically increase its presentation output to almost four times as many presentations and more than three times as often, the company needed to update its processes to significantly reduce the amount of time required to produce each presentation. RDI engaged Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner PSC Group, LLC to develop a new system for compiling and producing the data presentations using Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007 and Open XML Formats. With its new document generation solution, RDI can produce more presentations in less time, while reducing costs and offering more services to more customers.

British Sky Broadcasting Group (Sky) provides a range of entertainment and communications to 9.5 million households across the United Kingdom and Ireland. Sky relies heavily on its messaging solution for internal communications and resolving customer issues, and it must ensure that employees have a level of service that enables them to be as productive as possible. Sky joined the Microsoft® Rapid Deployment Program to deploy a pilot of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and evaluate how the new architecture and capabilities could help it improve its current environment. With Exchange Server 2010, Sky found that it could improve its level of service to employees, increase availability, and ease the effort to administer its messaging solution.

As a small advertising agency, Nebraska-based Chemistry Advertising struggled to manage customer projects because it lacked a centralized file storage system. To address that issue, the agency implemented Windows Server® 2008 R2 Foundation. The company now has an easy-to-manage system that helps employees to better organize and collaborate on projects. As a result, it expects to complete projects in half the time and to more easily accommodate business growth.

News America Inc. (NAI) provides corporate services to News Corporation, a global media company. Based in New York, where cubicle space is expensive, NAI has many employees who work remotely. NAI is deploying the Windows Server® 2008 R2 and Windows® 7 operating systems with the DirectAccess feature to simplify remote connectivity. NAI will use DirectAccess to improve users’ experience, streamline management, avoid a virtual private network hardware purchase, and help achieve green IT goals.