PREMIER Bankcard, LLC (PREMIER) one of the largest VISA and MasterCard credit providers in the United States, needed to enhance scalability and performance for its business intelligence (BI) data warehouse and online transaction processing (OLTP) databases. “BI began as an area of research for us, but has become absolutely mission critical,” says Dan Zerfas, Vice President of Software Development at PREMIER. The company enhanced its BI infrastructure by upgrading its 17-terabyte data warehouse to Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Enterprise (64-bit), hosted on a server computer with 16 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. PREMIER also upgraded its OLTP database to the 64-bit version of SQL Server 2008. The upgraded deployments provide a better view of the business, enterprise-grade scalability, maintenance without scheduled downtime, and easier database management.

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.

The Town of Claremont, a local authority in the Western Suburbs of Perth was looking to meet new compliance requirements as a result of the introduction of new legislation. By replacing a complex manual system with Meridio, a Microsoft-based Electronic Document Management and Records Management solution, they were able to meet the new compliancy requirements and gain significant other benefits including: strengthened security; greater efficiencies through automation; and improved ease of use. They also plan to leverage the system’s integration with other Microsoft-based solutions to create an aggregated portal view for each citizen which shows their current and past interactions with Council.

HOK, one of the top architectural firms in the world, was seeking a better approach to collaboration for its 2,600-plus employees worldwide, many of whom are mobile, and the hundreds of partners, vendors, and consultants with whom they work on a daily basis. The firm also wanted desktop productivity tools that would thoroughly integrate into its collaboration solution. HOK decided to convert its intranet platform from Cold Fusion to Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, and to migrate its client computing systems from Microsoft Office 2003 software to the 2007 Office release. With the new software deployed, mobile users and others are collaborating more intuitively, especially through shared calendaring and presence awareness, and are faster at creating presentations and worksheets. HOK also is enjoying the bandwidth economies of files that are up to 90 percent smaller.

Turkey’s Garanti Technology, which is owned by the Doğuş Group, a large Turkish conglomerate, was asked to create an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for Doğuş Automotive Group, an importer and distributor of passenger cars, light commercial vehicles, spare parts and accessories for Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, and other manufacturers. Garanti Technology created an ERP solution linking Doğuş automotive dealers, part suppliers, and other key partners using the Microsoft® Application Platform. The ERP solution, which includes a data warehouse, will soon be upgraded to Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 database software to take advantage of new features that make it easier to manage data, better utilize resources, and enhance information security. The solution was developed using Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 (and earlier versions) and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Lotte Hotel, one of the leading names in the Korean hotel industry, needed to centralize an IT infrastructure that had been distributed to the hotels in its chain. The company had found it difficult to integrate data from its distributed operations and bring it together in a timely fashion to support business intelligence (BI). Lotte Hotel decided to replace its old system, which used an Oracle database and replace it with a centralized solution using the Microsoft® Application Platform, including Microsoft SQL Server® 2005. Lotte Hotel’s new solution, called the IT Infrastructure Generation Change project, has provided the company with increased reliability and stability. The company has also benefitted from real-time BI analysis of centralized enterprise-wide data, and increased efficiency for its IT staff.

To keep pace with performance demands and update its IT environment, Banco Azteca decided to migrate its applications to a Windows Server®-based operating system. Unable to fully migrate the core banking system, Alnova, to Windows Server 2003, the bank began testing Windows Server 2008. Windows Server 2008 was fully compatible with Alnova and also improved performance in Web server layers, reducing the input/output queue from 30 per minute to 2.

Sports enthusiasts around the world place up to 1 million bets per day using the online sports betting services of Gibraltar-based bwin International. Performance is paramount at bwin which hosts more than 100 terabytes of information on some 100 instances of Microsoft® SQL Server®. The company was very happy with its deployment of SQL Server 2005, but it enjoyed 3-digit annual growth in 2005 and 2006 and is eager to take advantage of new technological advancements to help it keep pace with growth. The bwin Data Management Systems group has started upgrading its database infrastructure to SQL Server 2008 to take advantage of Backup Compression, management tools, and other new features. During peak gaming periods SQL Server processes 30,000 database transactions per second, while supporting the reliability required by the bwin database group’s motto: “Failure is not an option.”

Edgenet, and its Big Hammer Data Division, helps retailers and manufacturers serve customers by hosting a Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) and Marketing data pools of basic product attributes, providing a common classification for products. As the company prepared to launch its Edgenet Vision™ product that enables users to create a 3-dimensional (3D) representation of their homes and populate rooms with 3D images of appliances and furniture from the Big Hammer data pools, it needed an enterprise-grade platform. Big Hammer deployed Edgenet Vision hosted on Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) database software running on Windows Server® 2008 for Itanium-Based Systems, using a Software as a Service distribution model. The application developers used Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008. The solution runs on Unisys ES7000 enterprise server computers.