Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2009, Family Dollar required a more robust merchandising solution to accom-modate its continuing growth. In 2007, Family Dollar began the transformation of its merchandising tool set to a planned implementation of the SAS Integrated Merchandise Planning solution. Family Dollar faced a significant investment in new hardware, software, personnel, and maintenance because SAS recommended an AIX operating system; an infrastructure with which Family Dollar has limited experience. In a creative effort to reduce costs, Family Dollar partnered with SAS to explore the option of implementing a large scale solution on the Windows Server® 2003 Datacenter Edition. This would provide substantial savings, flexibility to scale with commodity hardware, greater interoperability with other systems, and cost-effective future growth.

Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), the state-owned oil and gas company based in Mexico City, has 150,000 employees and generated U.S.$98.2 billion in 2008. Some years ago PEMEX Exploration and Production, the company’s largest business unit, created its own document processing and workflow management application using early versions of Microsoft® SQL Server® database software and Microsoft BizTalk® Server. As success of the internally developed application spread, response times declined. To gain scalability, PEMEX Exploration and Production upgraded the solution to SQL Server 2008 Enterprise (64-bit) and BizTalk Server 2006 R2. CPU utilization has dropped and the company has gained the scalability it needs to roll out the solution to the rest of PEMEX. The company also plans to take advantage of SQL Server 2008 Transparent Data Encryption to enhance document protection.

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.

KONE is a leading elevator and escalator manufacturer. The global company sees the Internet as a channel to provide information needed by customers, but its content management solution made it difficult to keep Web sites around the world current. KONE built a new global Web presence—including 48 Web sites in 16 languages—based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Today, content coordinators around the globe can easily keep Web sites up-to-date—a capability that, when combined with the search functionality provided by Office SharePoint Server 2007, enables prospective customers to find the information they need and is helping drive new sales. KONE also deployed Office SharePoint Server 2007 for a new global intranet, which will enable the company to support both internal and external Web sites with a single technology solution and skill set.

One of the world’s largest food and beverage companies, Kraft Foods needed to give its brand groups greater speed and flexibility in connecting with consumers online. The company chose Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 as a new global standard for Web content management and is now running its three largest Web sites on its new solution, with plans to migrate all consumer-facing Web sites by the end of 2010. Through its use of Office SharePoint Server 2007, Kraft is benefiting from streamlined Web content publishing; support for new forms of digital marketing; and the performance, scalability, and reliability needed to support more than 100 million page views per month. What’s more, the solution’s rich capabilities and ease of management are expected to save Kraft millions of dollars over the next two years in agency fees, support costs, and development costs.

Up-to-date data analyses are a crucial success factor in the banking business. The RACON Software GmbH in Linz and RACON West Software GmbH in Innsbruck developed a central data warehouse for Raiffeisen Banking Groups, which allows for daily updated analyses while handling huge amounts of data. The loading is performed by time-saving automated processes that are controlled via metadata management. The total data volume comprises 55 terabytes. The solution was developed together with Microsoft Consulting Services, based on Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services 2005. The new 64-bit-architecture of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 saves hardware cost, increases performance and enables faster analyses, regardless of increasing data volume.

GSTAT provides business intelligence and data mining solutions, including real-time next best offers (NBO) to customers across a range of industries. GSTAT developed its GSTAT Xeligence data mining solutions using the Microsoft® Application Platform, including Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 database software. Customers using GSTAT’s Xeligence NBO solution from finance, telecom and retail, have enjoyed up to 10 times better response rates by making offers that have greater relevance to customers. The solution automates development and deployment of data mining models that used to take months of manual statistical work. Within healthcare, GSTAT Xeligence solutions have helped physicians use data mining of patient records to identify those that should be contacted proactively to prevent health deterioration that could lead to a medical crisis.

Panamedia Group created a better way for organizations to manage conferences and conventions with its BusyEvent solution. Before creating BusyEvent, the company needed to determine the best technology stack to build on. After considering use of Linux, Apache, and MySQL (sometimes referred to as the LAMP stack), it chose the Microsoft® Application Platform, including Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 database software and the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system. Panamedia Group chose the Microsoft Application Platform because of the security integrated into SQL Server and the rest of the stack, and because of the ease of development. The company found that the integrated stack and ease of developing and maintaining its solution using the Microsoft Application Platform provides a lower total cost of ownership than what it projected for LAMP.

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.

Microsoft China invested heavily into virtualization in one of its largest departments in an effort to reduce operating costs and to contribute to its environmental sustainability initiatives.