For 25 years Epicor has been creating creative enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small and mid-sized businesses and Global 1000 companies. Epicor has 20,000 customers in more than 150 countries, and generated 2008 revenue of U.S.$487.8 million. The company recently released Epicor 9, an innovative service-oriented architecture (SOA) offering that converges all of its products into a single, flexible solution using what Epicor refers to as its True SOA™ approach to delivering ERP solutions. To meet customer requests for a powerful and cost efficient reporting environment, the company migrated Epicor 9 reporting to Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Reporting Services. The report migration went smoothly and users benefit from easier report tracking, automated report distribution, and a better user experience from working with a more interoperable solution stack.

Coating Excellence International (CEI) manufactures high-quality, flexible-packaging products using environmentally friendly practices. To continue to enhance its quality and efficiency, CEI needed to provide its shop-floor operators and business decision makers with real-time production metrics and analysis tools in a solution that was quick to deploy and easy to manage with limited resources. It upgraded to Microsoft Dynamics® AX 4.0, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005, and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, and integrated those with its shop-floor application. As a result CEI enhanced its decision making and customer management tools. And by signing a Microsoft Volume Licensing Enterprise Agreement, it cut software license acquisition and management costs, set a predictable licensing cost per desktop, and gained Software Assurance benefits.

Raymond James provides a range of investment services through a network of more than 5,000 financial advisors operating in 2,200 locations around the world. To help these advisors continue to make fast, accurate, and cost-effective decisions, Raymond James created a suite of business intelligence (BI) tools that advisors use to analyze vast stores of product, client, and market data. The company’s BI platform is based on Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 data management software and SQL Server 2008 Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services. Today, 6,600 people use the Raymond James Reports Center to help make cost-effective decisions. By using software that Raymond James already owns, the firm will save U.S.$500,000 every three years in licensing efficiencies and will also eliminate additional training costs.

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.

Apptix is one of the world’s leading hosting providers of Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 mail systems. It serves 200,000 users with 1–5 gigabyte (GB) mailboxes. To maintain competitiveness and cut costs, Apptix needed a more efficient storage solution. With such large mailboxes to support, the company considered a direct-attached storage (DAS) solution and two storage area network (SAN) solutions. It chose the EMC CLARiiON CX4 SAN hardware from Microsoft Global Alliance Partner EMC. With this scalable solution, Apptix can offer customers high availability with fast recovery in the event of an outage. The solution saves space through thin provisioning, which makes it possible to move seldom-accessed data to inactive drives. Through its EMC and Microsoft solution, Apptix has reduced rack space, power, and IT costs, and has cut its total cost of ownership (TOC) by nearly 40 percent.

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.

Qalhat LNG, a producer of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the Sultanate of Oman, experienced frequent downtime and high rental fees for its leased IT services. It worked with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner KalSoft to deploy its own solution using Microsoft technologies. Now, Qalhat LNG no longer experiences delays—increasing employee productivity by up to two days a month—and has reduced IT operating expenses by nearly 30 per cent.

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.

Nick Rosa and Bob Shapiro, retired executives from NutraSweet and Monsanto, needed a way to store, protect, and access their vital personal documents—from insurance forms, medical records, and tax documents, to sentimental letters and photos. When they realized that many of their peers shared their need, they discovered a software opportunity. They created Morgan Street Document Systems and prototyped a highly customized Web site—then realized they needed more scalability, ease of use, and reliability than the original product could provide. Their answer was to move to Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and related Microsoft technologies. The new solution can scale 100-fold as the company grows, provides better than 99.5 percent uptime, and cuts the total cost of ownership by 90 percent over the cost of the prior site.

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.