To drive continued growth, Plante Moran, a leading U.S.–based financial services firm, needed to automate business development efforts. The company sought to replace its IBM Lotus Notes contact management system with an easy-to-use customer relationship management system built on a flexible, scalable platform. After evaluating a number of packaged solutions, Plante Moran chose Microsoft Dynamics® CRM based on its intuitive interface, powerful built-in toolset, and integration with line-of-business systems and productivity applications. Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Ascentium helped Plante Moran tailor the solution to automate key business functions, such as its client acceptance process. Since deploying the solution to 1,600 consultants, Plante Moran has strengthened its business development efforts and gained the agility to pursue strategic growth initiatives.

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.

Lokad is a software development company that delivers sales, demand, and call volume forecasts for more than 300 customers—from one-person eCommerce companies to multinational retailers. To improve its forecasting capabilities, the company developed advanced forecasting tools and models. However, the more powerful forecasting models required significantly more computing resources than the company had available. Lokad decided to implement its software-plus-services forecasting application on the Windows Azure™ platform—a quick, efficient process. As a result, Lokad reduced IT maintenance costs compared to traditional approaches, delivered more powerful and accurate forecasts to its customers, and improved its ability to expand into new markets.

RiskMetrics Group’s Risk Management Business delivers risk management services to the world’s leading asset managers, banks, and institutions to help them measure and model complex financial instruments. To meet increasing market demand for risk analysis, RiskMetrics needed to accommodate increasing peak loads on its computing infrastructure for specific periods of time. The company used the Windows Azure™ platform—an Internet-scale services platform hosted in Microsoft® data centers—to provide on-demand computing capacity for its analytics applications. Now RiskMetrics can complement its on-premises capabilities with a flexible, reliable solution that can support bursts in computing activity over short periods of time, deliver enhanced services for more customers, empower innovation, and provide the company with increased business agility.

VeriSign wanted to provide customers who deliver services on hosted infrastructures with the same highly secure encryption technology used in on-premises data centers. The company partnered with Microsoft to provide Windows Azure™ platform customers with enhanced protection for critical business data. With VeriSign® SSL Certificates on Windows Azure, customers receive an added layer of online security, while reducing management and maintenance costs.

BGC Partners, a provider of voice and electronic brokerage services, had an e-mail environment that could not easily scale to support expansion and did not provide adequate flexibility. In addition, exponential growth in the volume of e-mail messages and data created performance, stability, and storage issues. To address these challenges, BGC deployed Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010. By doing so, the company was able to replace the storage area network (SAN) that supported its e-mail system with lower cost direct-attached storage. The new solution improves system flexibility, performance, and stability. As a result, BGC has increased IT administrators’ productivity by up to 30 percent and reduced the time required to recover from system outages by 50 percent. BGC was also able to reallocate the existing SAN and avoid spending U.S.$1 million on SAN infrastructure for other projects.

As one of the largest private banks in Turkey with 421 branch offices, DenizBank was finding its decentralized messaging solution difficult to manage. The bank’s backup, archiving, and disaster recovery plans varied from branch to branch, making it difficult for the bank to scale its systems to accommodate projected growth. Upon learning about new features in Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010, the longtime Microsoft customer was eager to evaluate the software and became an early adopter in March 2009. Since deploying the solution to a pilot group of 150 users, DenizBank has increased system availability, simplified management, and improved the user experience for employees, especially when researching transactions. The bank can provide high availability with fewer servers, and it expects to save up to 60 percent on future storage costs.

SinoPac Holdings is the fourth-largest, privately-owned financial entity in Taiwan. It has more than U.S.$30 billion in total assets and its subsidiaries include a broad-range of financial services—from banks and credit cards to venture capital and financial consulting. The company uses information technology as a strategic tool. The company recognized that its core banking system, which was developed using COBOL programming language on a mainframe computer, no longer met its requirements and hindered its ability to remain competitive. SinoPac chose a new core banking system built on Windows Server® 2008 and Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008. The Microsoft Technology Center helped SinoPac select a vendor and develop a proof of concept, while helping the company improve its understanding of the technology. As a result, SinoPac gained a competitive advantage and improved IT efficiency.

To boost service, Loomis Armored US had to improve the flow of cash information among Loomis, its customers, and their banks. The company chose devices running the Windows Mobile® 6.1 operating system for messengers to send data to the data center where customers and their banks can access it. In addition, Loomis used a Windows Mobile device on customers’ safes to enable daily provisional crediting of deposits—before the cash leaves a customer’s premises.

MKB Bank has implemented an operational CRM and front-end solution to support the entire sales network through the deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.