Alpha Bank carefully evaluates customer feedback to provide improved services that meet customer needs. However, the bank’s infrastructure had grown obsolete, making it difficult for the IT team to effectively develop new services for its alternative banking channels, such as the Internet and phone. The Alpha Bank IT team worked with Microsoft Services to build a service-oriented architecture that would be more flexible. To provide end-to-end value, Microsoft Services also helped the bank develop a new call center application, establish a business intelligence solution for capturing customer data, and instill best practices for developing on the Microsoft application platform. With the help of Microsoft Services, Alpha Bank has reduced the risks of moving forward on a project of this magnitude and maximized the business value that IT delivers.

Oregon-based Umpqua Bank is known for its strategy of using its branches as customer-friendly sales sites. To extend that same inviting atmosphere to its Web site, Umpqua Bank adopted Voyager Consumer Banking from Fiserv—based on Microsoft® operating system and data management software—to create a personalized suite of online banking services for its 250,000 customers. Umpqua Bank now has the flexibility, scalability, availability, and cost-effectiveness that it needs to be innovative and competitive in the tough financial services market. Umpqua Bank expects to attract more customers and to double its online service usage to 40 percent within two years. It also expects maintenance costs to drop significantly due to consolidation of its online systems.

With 193 member nations, and programs worldwide, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is a broad and diverse organization with a complex and disparate IT environment. Solutions are deployed locally, without regard to ease of use, security rules, or access management at the international level. Implementing an enterprise resource planning solution revealed this lack of global management planning and led the organization to homogenize its IT system using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2006, and other Microsoft technologies. Now UNESCO is developing a solution that will unify its global IT environment while integrating with its SAP management system and allowing the implementation of new applications as necessary.

Turkey-based DenizBank realised the evolution of Web technologies presented both challenges and opportunities. The key challenge was to develop a robust infrastructure that could support all banking services reliably. The organisation required a fully integrated environment delivering customer relationship management, business process management, and a business intelligence layer to maximise efficiency and service quality. DenizBank worked with solution provider Intertech to build the inter-Next infrastructure, which uses Microsoft® technologies such as Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 data management software and Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2006. Today, customer satisfaction rates are high and the system can process a year’s worth of transactions in eight hours. After logging on once, personnel can access all applications on the network.

Many small and medium-sized engineering design enterprises don’t have the resources to support the design analysis and optimisation tools needed to stay competitive. Based in Whiteley in the United Kingdom (U.K.), dezineforce uses Windows® HPC Server 2008 to provide access to Web-based engineering design capabilities so smaller companies can prosper in the same market as large organisations.

Dillon Gage trades precious metals using a new trading portal that provides reliability, ease of use and speed for their customers. The portal is developed in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 using a Lawson ERP backend for processing. The SharePoint portal and Lawson communicate through a flexible services layer developed using Microsoft WCF.

Unum’s more than 2,000 insurance products are supported by roughly 60 legacy systems that were never intended to coexist or communicate. This fragmentation made it difficult for the insurance leader to serve its small business customers, who prefer a simple way to assess, purchase, and administer key benefits like life and disability plans. To integrate its various offerings and transition from a product-centric business model to a customer-centric model, Unum implemented a service-oriented architecture using several Microsoft® technologies. The solution, known as Simply Unum, has been transformational for the company and its small business clientele. The easy-to-use, online portal has eased benefits administration for customers, has streamlined Unum’s operational efficiency, and is expected to deliver more than U.S.$700 million in incremental premium revenue over the next five years.

SCANA is a holding company that includes electric and natural gas utilities in the Carolinas and Georgia. Years ago, SCANA deployed Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2002 to support critical business process management (BPM) functions such as billing, payroll, and electronic data interchange (EDI) transactions with vendors. By 2006, the number of EDI transactions had grown too large to manually audit and reconcile. Additionally, SCANA wanted to more fully implement an efficient Service Oriented Architecture and to streamline development of BPM applications. To address these challenges, SCANA upgraded to Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2, part of the Microsoft Application Platform. The new solution offers timely, meaningful information about EDI transactions and speeds their reconciliation. Its tight integration with the Microsoft .NET Framework helps to reduce development time and costs.

The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, integrating research and clinical care to serve 79,000 patients annually, wanted to improve the flow of its data. Because of its unique and sophisticated needs, M. D. Anderson chose to build an electronic medical record system in-house, with a service-oriented architecture to connect and display data using the Microsoft® .NET Framework. With the help of Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Avanade, M. D. Anderson implemented standards and processes to develop a sophisticated application to provide data to medical staff using the Microsoft environment. The system—and the IT department methodology it is built on—is flexible, highly secure, and scalable to support future growth. Most important, however, it has improved the productivity of M. D. Anderson medical staff, resulting in greatly enhanced patient care.

Brazilian wireline telecommunications service provider Telemar merged with wireless service provider Oi in 2003, but quickly realized that they had no easy way to merge their customer relationship management systems. Both operator efficiency and customer satisfaction diminished as contact center operators logged on and off multiple systems to try to answer customer questions. Outside the contact center, Oi managers realized that it was difficult to implement upsell and cross-sell campaigns, as they lacked a complete view about the customer, the services they had, and which services were available to them. Oi officials worked with Accenture and Microsoft to figure out how to consolidate all the customer data the newly created company had, and found the perfect solution in a single customer care application built on the Microsoft® Customer Care Framework.