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.

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.

Pella uses the latest technologies to craft beautiful, energy-efficient windows and doors. To support this work, the company’s IT Operations and Infrastructure team became an early adopter of the Windows® 7 operating system. After the pilot program is complete, Pella expects to benefit from the improved IT management, faster deployment, enhanced security, greater efficiency, and increased energy savings that the company is already seeing in the pilot phase.

The Missiles and Fire Control business unit of global aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin creates specialized products that range from missile defense systems and precision engagement weapons to creating heat rejection panels to protect those living aboard the International Space Station. Missiles and Fire Control has long used SAP software for its enterprise resource planning. Since migrating its SAP infrastructure from a UNIX/Oracle solution to Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit), the company reports enhanced performance and reliability, and a lower total cost of ownership including a significant savings in software and maintenance costs. Looking ahead to upgrading to SQL Server 2008, the company’s internal testing has found that the new Row Compression feature reduces database sizes by 37 percent while enhancing performance of some runs by more than 80 percent.

Eduify was founded to provide students with educational technology that can assist them in researching topics faster and writing better. To create its solution, Eduify received assistance as well, from Microsoft® technologies and services such as the Azure™ Services Platform, the Microsoft BizSpark™ ecosystem, and Windows Mobile® 6. Eduify took advantage of these technological and business resources to create a software-plus-services solution that delivers online writing help to students anywhere, anytime, with functionality and a user experience not possible from the Web alone. At the same time, Eduify gained a 40 percent faster time-to-market, U.S.$500,000 in development and other savings, and easier access to the largest market of mobile device users.

Everything about MySpace boggles the mind—from its 130 million monthly active users, to the 300,000 new users who sign up each day; and from its 8 billion friend relationships it manages, to the 34 billion e-mail messages it stores while adding 41 million more each day. The site’s 1 petabyte of data is managed by 440 Microsoft® SQL Server® instances and resides on 3PAR® Utility Storage. When MySpace needed a message queuing and delivery solution to help ensure data changes were correctly and atomically executed on all affected physical database instances, MySpace created an internal solution, called Service Dispatcher, using the Service Broker feature of SQL Server 2005. Service Broker has helped MySpace ensure data integrity across its distributed infrastructure, resulting in a better user experience. Service Broker also helps MySpace developers to roll out new services faster.

Superbuild succeeded in creating an online estimator service to produce bills-of-material for contractors, but it needed a new business model if it was going to succeed in marketing that service. The company decided to offer its solution to major retailers and manufacturers that have direct contact with contractors-customers, and to adopt a software-plus-services approach that enables each organization to deliver the solution as its own branded service through its own Web site. Meanwhile, by using Microsoft® technologies instead of Linux technologies, Superbuild reduced its development and maintenance costs and sped time-to-market. The software-plus-services approach also makes it possible for Superbuild to offer its service for new uses, such as actionable business intelligence, and to offer it in new ways, such as on phones and in-store kiosks.

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) represents the interests of more than 900 rural electric cooperative utilities in the United States. NRECA has 800 employees who provide trade association member services in addition to insurance and financial services for approximately 300,000 plan participants and beneficiaries. To keep data about those members-employees-participants confidential, the NRECA Information Security staff has to closely monitor and control NRECA employee identity credentials, which used to be a largely manual process. With the help of Logic Trends, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, NRECA deployed Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 to automate credential management. With new identity management tools, NRECA has been able to strengthen the protection of business systems, streamline credential management, and boost employee productivity.

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.