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.

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.

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.

Atea is an IT services provider based in Oslo, Norway, with seven subsidiaries throughout Europe. To better help customers update and implement software, Atea wanted to upgrade its 950 computers to the Windows® 7 operating system at its Norwegian branch. While the company plans to complete its upgrade by December 2009, it already benefits from enhanced security, improved power consumption, and increased employee productivity.

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.

Though Brigham Young University’s (BYU’s) Religious Education Computer Support maintains more than 300 PCs, only one full-time person, with a few additional part-time personnel, oversees the operation. The IT systems administrator expects reliability and high functionality in the organization’s chosen technology. He also needs solutions that can provide headroom to accommodate the department’s future growth. Part of the answer was found with the migration to Windows Vista.

Johns Hopkins Institutions wanted to trim the cost of managing its IT infrastructure, which spanned 1,500 Windows®, Linux, and UNIX operating system–based servers and 15,000 desktop computers. The organization deployed Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to manage all systems through one console, doubling monitoring efficiency, increasing application service levels, and improving auditing.