From November 2008 till July 2009, S-OIL built an enterprise-wide communications and collaboration platform. S-OIL not only upgraded its existing groupware but also from an integration perspective, chose to a method to link a single platform for portal, collaboration, groupware, mobile, search, messenger and video conferencing as well as IP telephony utilizing Microsoft’s technologies and solution. In addition, it deployed 2007 Microsoft Office System in the business user environment and laid the groundwork for comprehensive enterprise security system with Active Directory and Forefront product families. With this project, S-OIL achieves more about 121% of ROI effects including innovation of conference culture, improvement of payment related work processing speed and real time support of decision making.

E-learning specialist Aula Salud wanted a highly available, robust, and cost-effective solution to deliver education programs with video streaming for healthcare professionals in Spain. Aula Salud chose Atnova, which offered this kind of solution based entirely on Microsoft® technologies, rather than open-source development tools. With these solutions, Aula Salud achieved increased student numbers and a return on investment in the first year.

TWP Projects in South Africa needed a single integrated system for project management and accounting, including a tool to integrate employee timesheets with invoices. The company replaced its Softline Pastel and open-source systems with Microsoft Dynamics® SL business management software. Now, it has an integrated view of operations and revenue streams, which is boosting its ability to maximise profits and eliminating the risk of billing time incorrectly.

Genea provides energy management solutions to commercial property owners. Its Building Optimization Platform provides visibility into and control over energy consumption from the point of demand through billing for property managers and tenants. When it decided to create a Web-enabled, hosted version of its solution, Genea chose to use the Windows® 7 operating system for its performance, security features, scalability, and built-in Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 technology, along with Windows Server® 2008 R2 Enterprise for high availability. Genea noted that key software components of its solution run 35 percent faster on Windows 7 than on previous operating systems. The company is streamlining management of the Building Optimization Platform through enhanced remote access capabilities, while delivering a highly reliable solution that can handle large transaction volumes.

Client Profiles saw an opportunity to develop legal practice management software that was easier to use than established solutions from Lexis-Nexis and Thomson Reuters. The company built a solution that takes advantage of the integration between Microsoft Dynamics® CRM and Microsoft® Office Outlook® to automate common tasks, such as retrieving new contacts for archival in a shared marketing database. To meet project goals, including rapid time-to-market, Client Profiles capitalized on the flexibility of xRM, the business application framework that underpins Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Developers accessed prebuilt workflow components and reporting services available through xRM to quickly infuse CRM4Legal with features that benefit multiple roles within any law firm. With xRM, Client Profiles dramatically reduced development time and achieved an estimated cost savings of U.S.$2 million.

The Information Store® helps global petroleum companies access exploration and production data irrespective of where the data resides and presents it in a useful and familiar form. To maintain its competitive advantage, the company was eager to find a cost-effective way to extend its industry-leading PetroTrek® solutions to independent oil producers. The company evaluated two “software as a service” offerings and selected the Windows Azure™ platform—an Internet-scale “cloud services” platform that is hosted in Microsoft® data centers—as the foundation for its online Digital Oilfield solution, along with Microsoft SQL Azure, the Silverlight™ browser plug-in, and Bing™ maps for enterprise. The company expects to increase the operational efficiency of its customers by reducing upfront capital costs, reducing deployment cycles from months to days, and lowering ongoing operating expenses.

Sitemasher, developer of an innovative platform for building and managing Web sites, wanted to help Web professionals create scalable, data-driven Web sites faster, and at lower cost. The company also needed to lower its own systems infrastructure costs. Sitemasher used the Windows Azure™ platform to offer its application as a hosted service, delivering an efficient, highly available, and highly scalable Web site development and hosting environment to its customers. By hosting its application on Windows Azure through Microsoft® data centers, the company has minimized infrastructure costs and reduced ongoing maintenance. Finally, with no data centers of its own to manage, Sitemasher will refocus the time its development staff spent maintaining servers to improving and expanding the Sitemasher application, representing a time savings of approximately 20 percent.

A recognized world leader in technology research and development, 3M wanted to make its decades of expertise in the workings of the human visual system available as a service to customers. Using the Windows Azure™ platform, 3M created a Web-based application that gives designers the ability to invoke complex algorithms to analyze the effectiveness of a design, based on how the human eye will respond. By hosting its application in Microsoft® data centers, 3M has made an innovative service available to a global audience, while minimizing its investment in hardware infrastructure and ongoing administration. The solution, which permitted developers to evaluate frequent iterations of the application, helped the company speed time-to-market for its service and achieve higher quality results, faster than in a traditional development environment.

Persistent Systems provides software development services that help enterprises and public sector customers enhance their offerings. One of the company’s primary offerings is an e-government solution that helps governments and agencies deliver services and interact with constituents electronically. Persistent Systems needed a way to deliver its solution without requiring local governments to invest in new IT infrastructure and personnel. The company used the Windows Azure™ platform to deliver its e-governance applications on the Internet through a Microsoft® data center. Now Persistent Systems can offer its solution in a high-availability environment while reducing capital and maintenance costs for itself and its customers.

Acumatica is a software company that develops enterprise resource planning and business accounting software. Acumatica developed its Web-based software using the Microsoft® .NET Framework and offered on-premises software that required customers to invest in application and database servers. The company wanted to deliver a software-plus-services solution to its customers, effectively hosting and managing its solutions on the Internet through data centers. Acumatica chose to develop its software-plus-services application using Windows Azure™ and Microsoft SQL Azure™. As a result, Acumatica developed its hosted offering in five weeks, reduced capital expenditures, reduced the deployment time for customers while improving their ability to quickly scale up and down, and improved its time-to-market for new services.