Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), the state-owned oil and gas company based in Mexico City, has 150,000 employees and generated U.S.$98.2 billion in 2008. Some years ago PEMEX Exploration and Production, the company’s largest business unit, created its own document processing and workflow management application using early versions of Microsoft® SQL Server® database software and Microsoft BizTalk® Server. As success of the internally developed application spread, response times declined. To gain scalability, PEMEX Exploration and Production upgraded the solution to SQL Server 2008 Enterprise (64-bit) and BizTalk Server 2006 R2. CPU utilization has dropped and the company has gained the scalability it needs to roll out the solution to the rest of PEMEX. The company also plans to take advantage of SQL Server 2008 Transparent Data Encryption to enhance document protection.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) represents the interests of more than 900 rural electric cooperative utilities in the United States. NRECA has 800 employees who provide trade association member services in addition to insurance and financial services for approximately 300,000 plan participants and beneficiaries. To keep data about those members-employees-participants confidential, the NRECA Information Security staff has to closely monitor and control NRECA employee identity credentials, which used to be a largely manual process. With the help of Logic Trends, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, NRECA deployed Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 to automate credential management. With new identity management tools, NRECA has been able to strengthen the protection of business systems, streamline credential management, and boost employee productivity.

FSA Group serves Australians who need help controlling their debt. In mid-2007, the company redesigned its outdated IT environment to offer enterprise-class capabilities, standardizing on Windows Server® 2003, Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003, and other core Microsoft software. These improvements led to rapid growth in the data the company had to manage. To address this challenge, FSA Group worked with CommVault—a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner—to deploy CommVault Simpana software for data management, archiving, replication, and resource management. Using technology from FAST—a Microsoft subsidiary—Simpana also offers rapid content-based indexing and searching. Now, FSA Group retrieves archived documents in seconds instead of hours, saves about 40 hours a month on user requests, has achieved 99.999 percent uptime, and has simplified the path for upgrading its core Microsoft software.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software from SAP has won a foundational place in the IT infrastructure of organizations around the world. REALTECH, based in Walldorf, Germany, is an international consulting firm with more than 700 SAP-certified specialists that have developed a specialized practice in helping organizations migrate SAP from UNIX/Oracle and other operating system/database stacks to the Microsoft® Application Platform. REALTECH, which is platform-neutral, reports that its customers are migrating SAP deployments to the Microsoft Application Platform, including Microsoft SQL Server®, to enjoy a lower total cost of ownership and ease of use. Customers migrating to SQL Server 2008 can take advantage of new compression technology which will be especially appreciated by organizations performing Unicode conversions which can double the size of existing databases.

OJSC Donetsky Excavator produces construction machinery for the Eastern European market. Until recently, employees had to convert documents before sharing them with people outside the organisation, which was complicated and time consuming. In 2008, the company deployed a solution based on Microsoft® Office Standard 2007. Now, employees can easily share documents, and the IT team is 27 per cent more productive.

Engro, a fertiliser company based in Pakistan, uses SAP software to manage financial and human resources (HR) tasks. In 2007, two fires damaged servers in the company’s data centre, including the Linux server, which hosts the SAP software. The IT team spent more than a week restoring the operating system to guarantee access to this critical business application. Employees introduced a new solution based on Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition, reducing the time spent on server management and restoration, and better protecting the business.

Wrightwood Capital, a real-estate finance and investment company, was using manual data-handling processes to close deals. It could take employees days to find documents, and the company incurred rising payroll, hardware, and service costs to cope with the growing volume of information. The company decided to automate its document-handling processes with help from RightPoint Consulting and a solution based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. As a result, the company has improved workflow efficiency and expects to cut annual costs by more than U.S.$100,000. The solution is easy to use and support. And because employees are spending less time managing information, they can conduct business faster and close more deals.

Enterasys develops, markets, and supports its IT networking and security products from more than 40 locations around the globe. Through steady growth, the company’s application infrastructure had evolved into a collection of incompatible solutions that were cost prohibitive and inefficient to maintain. Employees had limited collaboration tools, which impacted overall productivity and customer service. Then Enterasys standardized on Microsoft® server and desktop business productivity technologies, replacing point solutions with user-friendly software on a single operating system platform. The company is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in license fees, hosting, and administration costs. Today, Enterasys is building a competitive advantage by delivering strategic tools that employees use to work more efficiently and build customer-centric business processes.

The Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner relied on a legacy mainframe that was about to lose support. So, the agency re-engineered its applications for Windows® and the Microsoft® .NET environment with the help of Aithent, a Microsoft Certified Partner. The migration cost about 30 percent less than expected—while providing 30 percent more functionality, and accelerating the collection of licensing revenue from insurance agents and insurance companies.

Conceptus, a medical device manufacturer, needed more visibility into its sales data. Experiencing rapidly accelerating growth, the company struggled to track key data; reports took days to write; and sales staff could not view trends and plan efficiently, nor did they have ready access to order status. Conceptus then engaged Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Dell Global Infrastructure Consulting Services to deploy Microsoft business intelligence software. The software integrates with the company’s existing Microsoft products, including Microsoft Dynamics® CRM, and with its enterprise resource planning system. Today, Conceptus has gained easy access to key data, and the publishing time for each report has been cut from four hours to four minutes. Conceptus can also track and measure its marketing campaigns. The solution—which can be extended—was half the cost of a competitive offering.