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.

Everything about MySpace boggles the mind—from its 130 million monthly active users, to the 300,000 new users who sign up each day; and from its 8 billion friend relationships it manages, to the 34 billion e-mail messages it stores while adding 41 million more each day. The site’s 1 petabyte of data is managed by 440 Microsoft® SQL Server® instances and resides on 3PAR® Utility Storage. When MySpace needed a message queuing and delivery solution to help ensure data changes were correctly and atomically executed on all affected physical database instances, MySpace created an internal solution, called Service Dispatcher, using the Service Broker feature of SQL Server 2005. Service Broker has helped MySpace ensure data integrity across its distributed infrastructure, resulting in a better user experience. Service Broker also helps MySpace developers to roll out new services faster.

CSR Limited (CSR), which traces its roots to 1855, is one of the largest manufacturers in Australia. It is the sixth largest sugar producer in the world and a major manufacturer of building products including plasterboard, roofing material, insulation, and glass. CSR is also a joint venture participant in the Tomago aluminium smelter. The company uses SAP software to manage its multinational enterprise. CSR originally deployed SAP on a UNIX/Oracle stack, but later migrated to the Microsoft® Application Platform including Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 database software. Running SAP on SQL Server has proven so effective that after the company recently purchased Australia and New Zealand’s Pilkington Glass, it again migrated SAP from the UNIX/Oracle stack to the Microsoft Application Platform. CSR is enjoying a lower total cost of ownership, enhanced performance, and high availability.

First American Title Insurance Company, a subsidiary of The First American Corporation, traces its history to 1889. One of the largest title insurance companies in the nation, the company offers title services through its direct operations and an extensive network of agents throughout the United States and abroad. Over the years, the company acquired several companies, leading to a complex IT environment that at one point had more than 50 different title and escrow systems. The company united these disparate systems with its First American Software Technology (FAST) solution, deployed on the Microsoft® Application Platform, recently upgrading its FAST solution to Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 to take advantage of features such as Online Indexing and enhanced replication. The solution’s primary database holds more than 8 terabytes of information, with 850 million rows in the largest table.

Kelley Blue Book is a major provider of pricing for new and used cars and trucks. The company’s consumer-facing Web site, www.kbb.com, averages 12 million visits each month, and millions more users view syndicated Kelley Blue Book information on other sites. Supported by stand-alone systems and older technology, the company’s products were starting to fall short of market requirements. Kelley Blue Book then rebuilt its IT infrastructure using the Windows Server® 2003 operating system, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 data management software, and the Microsoft .NET Framework. The company now has a reliable IT infrastructure that provides strong security, is easy to manage, and enables the rapid delivery of new Web experiences. Just as important, Kelley Blue Book can keep its IT systems running with minimal costs, making it possible for the company to spend more on product development.

Egypt’s Bavarian Auto Group, which is sole distributor of BMW, MINI, Rolls-Royce, and other top automotive lines in Egypt, had a problem many companies would love to have: how to cope with 400 percent growth over the last five years. The company, which also operates an assembly line for BMWs in Egypt, chose SAP as its enterprise resource planning solution, and after considering several options decided to deploy SAP on the Microsoft® Application Platform, including Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) database software. Bavarian Auto Group chose the solution over an existing IBM AS400 system with an IBM DB2 database, and over an Oracle-based solution, because it wanted the ease of integration it enjoys with the Microsoft Application Platform, and determined that it would gain enterprise-grade performance while enjoying a lower total cost of ownership.

Based in Calgary, Canada, TransAlta is an international power generator and wholesale marketer of electricity. The company had relied on an outsourcer for its help desk and service management solution, which supported 48 facilities across Canada, the United States, and Australia. The outsourced solution was limiting the IT department’s view into data center operations and slowed resolution of server and network issues. For better insight into its distributed infrastructure, TransAlta deployed an end-to-end service management solution based on Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007 and EMC Smarts. Now, the IT department resolves issues faster, is implementing service-level management, and is laying a solid foundation for deploying new business applications. These enhanced management capabilities enable TransAlta to deliver power more efficiently, with less environmental impact.

Cairo Oil Refining Company wanted to reduce network costs and increase efficiency. It deployed Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise with Hyper-V™ virtualization technology to convert several physical servers to virtual machines running on a single high-performance physical server. This solution significantly reduced hardware costs, power consumption, and administration time, and helped improve employee efficiency.

Microsoft runs its worldwide operations on SAP ERP. With 92,000 employees and operations in 89 countries, the largest software company in the world has plenty of data to track, running some 19 million SAP transactions a month against its 6.5-terabyte database. The company was happy with how well its SAP deployment was hosted by Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 running on Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition, but it upgraded to the beta edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 to take advantage of new features, including Data Compression, Backup Compression, and some enhancements to existing features like Database Mirroring. Microsoft found it easy to upgrade to the new version of SQL Server, requiring extremely short downtime and no need to manually synchronize the disaster recovery site. The solution provides enterprise-grade stability and performance, even in its beta release.

In 2007, grocery retailer Bashas’ brought its Web sites in-house when its Web hosting company discontinued its service. Bashas’ wanted more insight and control of its systems, and decided to standardize on a Microsoft®-based infrastructure. It migrated the Web sites from the Linux operating system to the Windows Server® 2003 Standard Edition operating system and deployed Internet Information Services 6.0. It also migrated its pricing application from an IBM DB2 database to Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 data management software, which it deployed on a three-node cluster running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition. The migra¬tions went smoothly, and Bashas’ achieved simplified manage¬ment, high availability, and reliability. It increased the performance of some tasks by 400 percent. With its new, scalable, and highly secure infrastructure, Bashas’ also cut its total cost of ownership.