Sneaky Games creates video games for multiple online platforms, including Facebook and other social media. With millions of players online each day, the company required a solution that could quickly scale up and down as needed. To ensure rapid response times and continuous availability, the company runs its entire infrastructure—including a content delivery network, game servers, and databases—in the cloud on the Windows Azure platform. By taking advantage of features such as binary large object (BLOB) storage and caching services to store player and game information, Sneaky Games ensures that data is always ready and quickly accessible. And with Windows Azure development tools, the small team can speed game development without requiring an IT department. As a result, the company can focus on doing what it loves to do—creating great games.

Direct Edge, one of the largest equities exchanges in the world, wanted a better, faster business intelligence (BI) solution for its financial analysts to use to create reports. Direct Edge implemented a data warehouse and BI solution based on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse, which has given the company more visibility into its data. The firm can also provide analytical reports in seconds rather than hours and can better drive business growth.

WISEITECH, one of the representative enterprises in the domestic enterprise solution industry, is now concentrating on the cloud-based solutions, moving away from the business strategy focused on the package solutions. WISEITECH launched its BI solutions in time with the release of Windows Azure in 2011. WISEITECH's WISE Cloud BI features a data mart architecture based on relational databases (RDB) with Hadoop applied for the big data analysis and an in-memory data storage for quick analysis in real time. That is, WISEITECH designed a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environment consisting of Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and Hadoop on Windows Azure, and then built a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) on this platform with functions for social analysis, On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), Executive Information System (EIS), and visualization. B

Ascribe, a leading provider of IT solutions for the healthcare industry, wanted to help clinicians identify trends and improve services by supplying faster access to information. However, exploding volumes of structured and unstructured data hindered insight. To solve the problem, Ascribe designed a hybrid-cloud solution with built-in business intelligence (BI) tools based on Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and Windows Azure. The solution also includes apps that run on Windows 8 tablets. By simplifying implementation with end-to-end Microsoft products, the company developed a proof of concept within six weeks. Now, clinicians can respond faster with self-service BI tools and gain actionable insight from a wide variety of data that includes clinical records, emergency room notes, and social media feeds.

Georgia-Pacific is a leading producer of building products and paper goods for consumers worldwide. To address rapid business growth, the company’s Building Products unit needed a higher-performing, more scalable data warehouse. In response, the firm implemented Microsoft SQL Server Fast Track data warehouse, which has greatly improved performance and provides faster and more reliable access to crucial business information. The solution also increases scalability and will offer a better view of data.

The Halo franchise is an award-winning collection of properties that has grown into a global entertainment phenomenon. To date, more than 50 million copies of Halo video games have been sold worldwide. As developers prepared to launch Halo 4, they were tasked with analyzing data to gain insights into player preferences and support an online tournament. To handle those requests, the team used a powerful Microsoft technology called Windows Azure HDInsight Service, based on the Apache Hadoop big data framework. Using HDInsight Service to process and analyze raw data from Windows Azure, the team was able to feed game statistics to the tournament’s operator, which used the data to rank players based on game play. The team also used HDInsight Service to update Halo 4 every week and support a daily email campaign designed to increase player retention.

As a leading provider of value-added network services in Korea, Smartro processes millions of invoice, settlement, credit card, and purchase transactions a day for Korean retailers. To speed up manual data extraction and analysis processes, Smartro implemented a data warehouse using the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance Optimized for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse. Smartro now has a technology foundation for expanding its business and processing more transaction data. Because business users can easily produce their own reports, report requests have decreased by 62 percent, and data extraction time has been slashed by 80 percent. Additionally, Smartro can adapt its data warehouse to accommodate constantly changing regulatory policies.

In testing semiconductor wafers, AMD uses a data warehouse to process and analyze one terabyte of data each week. When its data warehouse began foundering under the load, AMD switched to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse powered by AMD Opteron™ processors. With the new system, AMD has increased performance and enabled a sustainable and scalable solution.

Auckland Airport wanted better business intelligence (BI) tools to optimize operations, so it replaced existing Oracle and Cognos products with a BI solution that includes Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. As a result, the airport has improved business agility and profitability with near-real-time access to analytics information. In addition, it has simplified and strengthened regulatory compliance and significantly reduced reporting time.

Air Products has ambitious plans to expand its business by 50 percent without increasing its IT budget. To cost-effectively handle more data, Air Products upgraded its SAP databases to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and industry-standard servers. As a result, Air Products has reduced business data warehouse storage needs by up to 75 percent, improved database performance by 50 percent, and simplified backup procedures—all of which help the business expand.