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.

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.

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.

Having been in the business since the 1860s, Australia’s QR Limited knows how to run a railroad. As the company prepared to upgrade its SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) software it decided to move its SAP applications and databases from a mainframe and DB2 environment to the Microsoft® Application Platform, including Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 database software running on a geocluster supported by the Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. The company estimates it is saving about U.S.$100,000 per month in mainframe costs, since moving its SAP infrastructure to a cluster of commodity servers running the Microsoft Application Platform. QR Limited reports 20 to 40 percent faster SAP transactional response times and up to 8 times faster batch processing since moving SAP to SQL Server 2005.

Egypt’s Bavarian Auto Group, which is sole distributor of BMW, MINI, Rolls-Royce, and other top automotive lines in Egypt, had a problem many companies would love to have: how to cope with 400 percent growth over the last five years. The company, which also operates an assembly line for BMWs in Egypt, chose SAP as its enterprise resource planning solution, and after considering several options decided to deploy SAP on the Microsoft® Application Platform, including Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) database software. Bavarian Auto Group chose the solution over an existing IBM AS400 system with an IBM DB2 database, and over an Oracle-based solution, because it wanted the ease of integration it enjoys with the Microsoft Application Platform, and determined that it would gain enterprise-grade performance while enjoying a lower total cost of ownership.

Microsoft runs its worldwide operations on SAP ERP. With 92,000 employees and operations in 89 countries, the largest software company in the world has plenty of data to track, running some 19 million SAP transactions a month against its 6.5-terabyte database. The company was happy with how well its SAP deployment was hosted by Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 running on Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition, but it upgraded to the beta edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 to take advantage of new features, including Data Compression, Backup Compression, and some enhancements to existing features like Database Mirroring. Microsoft found it easy to upgrade to the new version of SQL Server, requiring extremely short downtime and no need to manually synchronize the disaster recovery site. The solution provides enterprise-grade stability and performance, even in its beta release.

As one of the largest appliance manufacturers in Europe, Turkey’s Arçelik uses SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) to help manage its global operations. When Arçelik needed to refresh its software and hardware infrastructure, it faced the question of whether to update its existing Sun/Solaris/Oracle technology stack or migrate to a new solution. After analyzing options, including conducting onsite proof of concept testing of an IBM/DB2 stack and the Microsoft® Application Platform hosted on HP servers, Arçelik decided to migrate to the Microsoft/HP solution, including a forthcoming upgrade to Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 Enterprise database software running on the Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise operating system. The software is hosted on HP Integrity rx8640 and HP ProLiant DL380 server computers. Arçelik has enjoyed 3 times faster performance and a lower total cost of ownership.

Powell Electronics, a distributor serving major defense and aerospace companies, wanted to automate its order processing. Orders arrived as electronic documents, but employees had to process them manually by converting them into text format, extracting production requirements, and entering this information into the company’s enterprise resource planning software. This process diverted staff from other tasks, risked errors, and reduced efficiency. By implementing a business process management solution based on Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2006 R2, part of the Microsoft Application Platform, Powell eliminated manual order entry and gained economies of scale by scheduling production in larger lot sizes. A top salesperson who had been spending 20 hours per week processing orders can now focus on sales, and the efficiency of processing production orders has increased by 40 percent.

TÜV NORD Group provides inspection and certification services for numerous industries. With 8,000 employees spread across Germany and 70 other countries, the company sought a way to simplify remote access to IT resources. Mobile employees also needed an easier way to work with the company’s mission-critical customer relationship management system from SAP. And with databases growing by approximately 100 gigabytes a month, TÜV NORD needed an effective data-compression tool. In 2007, the company addressed its challenges with Windows Server® 2008, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008, and Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008. As a result of its new solutions, TÜV NORD is saving money, accelerating remote-access setup, speeding application development, and boosting system security and availability.