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.

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 In mid-2007, the company redesigned its outdated IT environment to offer enterprise-class capabilities, standardizing on Windows Server® 2003, Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003, and other core Microsoft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.

Based in Düsseldorf, Germany, HSBC Trinkaus used several monitoring solutions to maintain a mixture of servers. It also lacked a detailed application-level monitoring system. By deploying Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, the bank now has one place to view performance indicators for all systems and a way to monitor applications across multiple platforms.

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.

Having a successful product can place lots of pressure on IT. That’s what BT Financial Group (BT) found after the company’s Wrap application for managing investment portfolios proved so popular that the influx of new customers threatened to outpace the capacity of its application infrastructure, based upon a 32-bit database management system (DBMS). BT considered options including moving to a 64-bit version of its existing DBMS. After working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Avanade to conduct a proof of concept study and lab tests, BT migrated its Wrap infrastructure to the Microsoft Application Platform, including Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) database software. BT gained the performance and scalability it required, with some operations being completed more than 10 times faster, while enjoying a lower total cost of ownership.

First American Title Insurance Company, a subsidiary of The First American Corporation, traces its history to 1889. One of the largest title insurance companies in the nation, the company offers title services through its direct operations and an extensive network of agents throughout the United States and abroad. Over the years, the company acquired several companies, leading to a complex IT environment that at one point had more than 50 different title and escrow systems. The company united these disparate systems with its First American Software Technology (FAST) solution, deployed on the Microsoft® Application Platform, recently upgrading its FAST solution to Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 to take advantage of features such as Online Indexing and enhanced replication. The solution’s primary database holds more than 8 terabytes of information, with 850 million rows in the largest table.

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.

Allianz Brasil Seguros, the Brazilian subsidiary of the Allianz Group, wanted to improve the productivity of its insurance sales team and give it access to information about brokers in the field. The company deployed Microsoft® Dynamics® CRM for 400 employees—half of whom work remotely. Managers now have better strategic and day-to-day control over the sales team, which, in turn, has detected more new business opportunities and improved customer service.

The insurance industry depends on up-to-date information and complex calculations. Life insurance providers work with calculations that often extend for decades into the future and are therefore highly complicated. During the compilation of an insurance quotation, a consultant will require quick access to applications and data sources to be able to calculate the insurance premium. As an internal service provider of the ERGO Insurance Group, ITERGO looks after a number of well known insurance companies. The company values Microsoft as a reliable partner with regard to safeguarding IT services. Microsoft supplies provides strategic and logical use of new products and the ongoing support of IT operations. ITERGO constantly employs new technology, guarantees excellent availability and value for money, and provides a valuable contribution for the future of the ERGO Insurance Group.