To give citizens information about state and local government employee salaries, the California State Controller’s Office engaged SymSoft Solutions to help deploy a business intelligence (BI) solution based on the Microsoft platform. With it, the public can create custom BI using 15 gigabytes of data and 5 million records. The solution also facilitates activism, speeds efficiency, and delivers a scalable foundation to support future BI projects.

Compliance with federal requirements is a challenge for medical professionals, as new laws, new technologies, and new ways of working continually call for new solutions. Excel Anesthesia, a 26-physician group, found a long-term solution for secure, compliant email in Microsoft Office 365. By choosing Microsoft, the practice also avoided 83 percent of the cost of an on-premises solution.

Irish Life, based in Dublin, Ireland, offers life insurance and pension products to individuals and businesses throughout the country. To respond to a difficult economy, the company sought a more cost-effective environment to support its critical insurance administration application. Irish Life migrated the application to a new solution based on Microsoft database technology. As a result, the company will save US$2.5 million in annual operating costs and will be able to increase its business. The solution also lowers system runtimes by 75 percent, boosts application availability, and increases developer productivity.

To deliver competitive services that balance risks and returns, Union Bank of Israel needed greater operational insight. To achieve this, the bank replaced a third-party reporting solution with one based on the Microsoft platform. With it, the bank speeds efficiency by over 50 percent, increases insight and accuracy, minimizes risk, improves collaboration, and facilitates agility.

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.

Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust wanted to improve patient safety and productivity across the hospital teams. The Business-Critical SharePoint solution, Ascribe eHandover connects Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Enterprise with their line-of-business systems, improving efficiency, transparency, and reputation. Now they are using SharePoint for a lot more than just managing documents, they are managing patients and improving patient safety.

DATEV, one of the leading IT service providers for tax advisers, auditors, and attorneys in Germany, intended to deliver hosted cloud-based Microsoft solutions to its 39,000 customers. DATEV is now offering hosted Microsoft Office 2010 to replace an earlier version of Microsoft Office software to 1,000 of its 39,000 customers that have already moved to the private cloud. DATEV is considering adding other hosted services, including Microsoft Lync 2010 and the Windows Azure cloud operating system.

Mercom Corporation is an IT services provider that specializes in networking, communications, and security solutions. In 2010, the company’s business with the US government took off, making Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) compliance a necessity. At the same time, Mercom faced increasing demand for its project management services. However, Mercom relied on NetSuite, which lacked both of those requirements. To maintain DCAA compliance and bring financial and project management together under a single solution, the company engaged SSi Consulting and implemented Microsoft Dynamics SL. With the new solution in place, the company now has the capabilities it needs and has dramatically improved insight into operations, eased reporting, maintained DCAA compliance, and will achieve a full payback in only two-and-a-half years.

Hans Ploenes, a producer of ties and trader of men’s fashion accessories under the J. Ploenes brand, changed its business model to have contractors perform all manufacturing. This change necessitated an adjustment in the company’s business software, which was highly customized and offered limited flexibility. With help from Microsoft partner Hanse Solution, Hans Ploenes reimplemented and upgraded to the most recent version of Microsoft Dynamics NAV, its ERP system, together with Trimit Fashion, which added industry-specific capability. Today, the company has a standard solution that provides the software functionality it requires and that is easy to update and maintain. The integrated ERP system fits employees’ actual roles, smoothly supports the company’s new operating model, and lets business executives remain firmly in control to produce the highest possible product quality.

Thomson Reuters had just six weeks to create an equity short-position reporting solution to comply with new securities legislation. Microsoft Silver Partner Rapid Addition designed a web-based solution using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 and the Thomson Reuters Elektron cloud platform, which connects data from multiple third-party trading systems and transmits it using the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol.