The next wave of SQL Server investments will help extend organizations beyond the database with a cloud-ready information platform that delivers mission critical confidence, breakthrough insight, and cloud on your terms.
Forrester found that upgrading to SQL Server 2012 can deliver an anticipated ROI between 149%-189% with a projected 12-13 month payback period. In interviews with SQL Server customers, Forrester identified the following key benefits for investing in SQL Server 2012:1) Higher productivity for DBAs, System Admins and Application Developers2) Avoiding penalties due to outages or data loss3) New capabilities for users with self-service BI and reporting tools
The findings from several customer case studies demonstrate that on average a DBA could manage over 65 SQL Server databases, while Oracle implementations required one DBA per 15 databases. Factoring in slightly higher average salaries for Oracle DBAs, the annual cost for administration comes out to $1,605 per year per database for SQL Server and $7,385 per year per Oracle Database; a 460% difference.
Baltika Brewing Company sells 30 brands of beer in more than 75 countries. To help manage operations and services, approximately 7,000 people use a CRM system that runs on the Microsoft platform.
With SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn, the reporting server contains the information about a transaction with 1 million commands in just 1 second. With the previous solution, a transaction with 9 million commands would have taken 950 seconds to write to the reporting server. Today, it is sent in just 3.5 seconds.
Since 2002, SQL Server is the most secure of any major database platforms, having reported the fewest number of reported vulnerabilities of any database. These statistics were compiled independently by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the government agency that monitors security vulnerabilities by technology, vendor, and product (see Exhibit 1).
Redknee TCB (Turnkey Converged Billing) running on SQL Server 2012 has been benchmarked to support 250 million subscribers. The 250 million-subscriber test exceeded the performance objectives for both invoicing and mediation, generating 26 million invoices within a six hour billing cycle, and mediating 4.9 billion Call Detail Records within 12 hours, showing a near-linear scalability as the number of subscribers increased.
Business Intelligence (BI) platforms enable all types of users to build applications that help organizations learn about and understand their business. Gartner defines a BI platform as a software platform that delivers the 14 capabilities. These capabilities are organized into three categories of functionality: integration, information delivery, and analysis. Information delivery is the core focus of most BI projects today, but we are seeing an increased interest in deployments of analysis to discover new insights, and in integration to implement those insights.
According to the benchmark study, the OpenText Email Monitoring solution running on SQL Server 2012 processed 14.8 million messages in 24 hours. This far exceeds any known published benchmark results for email monitoring solutions and is approximately 15 times higher than the typical message ingestion volume for large organizations that process 1-1.5 million messages per day.
Gartner has positioned Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant in the 2012 Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems, based on its completeness of vision and ability to execute in the data warehouse DBMS market.
"One of my favorite products of the year was Microsoft's free add-in for Excel 2010, PowerPivot. The tool, which adds a new sort of spreadsheet option to Excel, first grabbed my attention for the way it enables users to work with much larger sets of data than is possible with Excel alone. In one case, I used PowerPivot to load and browse through a data set that ran 3.9 million rows-about four times Excel's existing upper limit-and I had no more trouble scrolling around in the set than I would with a spreadsheet of only several hundred rows." -eNews, Jason Brooks
By migrating an SAP ERP environment to SQL Server, unplanned downtime could be reduced by over 20 percent, IT labor costs could be cut by nearly 25 percent, and ongoing software support costs could be reduced by up to 85 percent. Migration from competitive databases is simplified by using tools, best practices, and SAP migration certified specialists. Quantitative results may emerge in as little as nine months, with an ongoing annual savings potential of 30 to 37 percent.
Havas Media wanted to improve operations and client services with better business intelligence (BI) tools. After evaluating more than 20 solutions-including those from Oracle and IBM-Havas Media implemented a Microsoft data warehouse and BI solution to take advantage of enhanced reporting capabilities. As a result, it has cut report generation time by 80 percent and improved client services. The company is more competitive with the new solution and believes that BI services will drive business growth.
