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.

CSR Limited (CSR), which traces its roots to 1855, is one of the largest manufacturers in Australia. It is the sixth largest sugar producer in the world and a major manufacturer of building products including plasterboard, roofing material, insulation, and glass. CSR is also a joint venture participant in the Tomago aluminium smelter. The company uses SAP software to manage its multinational enterprise. CSR originally deployed SAP on a UNIX/Oracle stack, but later migrated to the Microsoft® Application Platform including Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 database software. Running SAP on SQL Server has proven so effective that after the company recently purchased Australia and New Zealand’s Pilkington Glass, it again migrated SAP from the UNIX/Oracle stack to the Microsoft Application Platform. CSR is enjoying a lower total cost of ownership, enhanced performance, and high availability.

Trimble Mobile Resource Management (MRM) provides solutions that help businesses manage mobile workers and assets. Two years ago, the development group within Trimble MRM did not have an integrated tool set for application life-cycle management. Instead, developers used a mixed set of tools and ad-hoc processes, which limited developer productivity, made it hard to accurately gauge progress, and hampered collaboration with the company’s quality assurance (QA) group. By adopting Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008, the Trimble MRM development group improved all aspects of application life-cycle management—from project estimation and progress tracking to software quality and collaboration with the QA group. Developers are 30 percent more productive, code reuse is strong, and improved visibility into project status and progress are benefiting all stakeholders.

Engro, a fertiliser company based in Pakistan, uses SAP software to manage financial and human resources (HR) tasks. In 2007, two fires damaged servers in the company’s data centre, including the Linux server, which hosts the SAP software. The IT team spent more than a week restoring the operating system to guarantee access to this critical business application. Employees introduced a new solution based on Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition, reducing the time spent on server management and restoration, and better protecting the business.

Omnicell, which develops systems and software solutions for the healthcare industry, maintained multiple source-code repositories, causing headaches for engineers and managers. The company now uses Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server for single-repository code management, which has improved management, visibility of project status, and productivity throughout the development organization.

Enterasys develops, markets, and supports its IT networking and security products from more than 40 locations around the globe. Through steady growth, the company’s application infrastructure had evolved into a collection of incompatible solutions that were cost prohibitive and inefficient to maintain. Employees had limited collaboration tools, which impacted overall productivity and customer service. Then Enterasys standardized on Microsoft® server and desktop business productivity technologies, replacing point solutions with user-friendly software on a single operating system platform. The company is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in license fees, hosting, and administration costs. Today, Enterasys is building a competitive advantage by delivering strategic tools that employees use to work more efficiently and build customer-centric business processes.

Diversified manufacturer Kimball International wanted to reduce the total cost of ownership of its 10-terabyte SAP BW and ECC 5.0 systems. An analysis showed it could reduce overhead by more than $500,000 a year in ongoing software licensing and hardware servicing costs by migrating from the Oracle/UNIX stack to the Microsoft® Application Platform. But the migration would have to be seamless not to disrupt its operations. Working with Microsoft Gold Certified partner RealTech, Kimball migrated each of its three SAP systems in three separate projects. All three migrations were completed over weekends, and Kimball is enjoying a lower total cost of ownership while gaining 30 percent to 50 percent faster processing. Migrating from Oracle/UNIX to Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 and the rest of the Microsoft Application Platform has also helped the company achieve easier systems management.

Quanta Computer has a global workforce of 30,000 generating annual revenue of U.S.$25 billion as one of the world’s largest manufacturers of laptop computers and other computing devices for the biggest names in the industry ranging from Apple iPods to notebooks, laptops, and other devices for Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sony, Toshiba and other pillars of the computing industry. With its SAP database supporting its global operations growing by more than half a terabyte a month, Quanta needed either to replace its SAN infrastructure or to find a compression solution. The company upgraded to Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Enterprise (64-bit) to take advantage of new SQL Server compression technology. SQL Server 2008 Database Compression has reduced some tables by as much as 90 percent, while SQL Server 2008 Backup Compression has provided compression of 85 percent.

Kelley Blue Book is a leading provider for new and used automobile values. The company’s Web site, kbb.com, averages 12 million visits per month. To succeed on the Web, the company needs to provide consumers with reliable, immediate access to car values in new and innovative ways, whether users are sitting in front of their PCs or want information via their mobile phones. The company’s use of Microsoft® software gives Kelley Blue Book a Web presence with which it can easily deliver the innovative experiences that customers demand—in turn, helping Kelley Blue Book differentiate itself from its competition and drive new revenues. Just as important, Kelley Blue Book can maintain a reliable Web presence with minimal costs, making it possible for the company to spend more on new product development.

This Italian pharmaceutical company implemented Microsoft Dynamics® CRM to help its transition from a product-centric culture to a customer-centric one. With the help of its Microsoft® partner, Trueblue, the company customized its CRM to fit its unique sales process and to meet regulatory requirements. The CRM solution enhanced the accuracy of sales pipeline reports while increasing the productivity of salespeople.