High Tech Electronics: Customer Stories

AMD is one of the world’s two largest manufacturers of computer microprocessors. For more than three decades, AMD has been building the technologies that run the world’s personal computers, workstations, servers, handheld devices, and game consoles. AMD needed to replace its Web content management system, update its enterprise Internet site, and develop a single environment for managing all its Web assets. In 2007, AMD initiated a project to deploy Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to manage global and local content at the company’s enterprise Internet site. The company built a Web content management solution that could scale to a very high volume, support regional Web sites, and put Web content management into the hands of business users.

APC by Schneider Electric, a global leader in critical power and cooling services, provides industry-leading product, software, and systems for home, office, data center, and factory-floor applications. The APC IT staff supports the business by keeping key applications available and running at peak performance. To do a better job of this and to reduce costs, APC deployed Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, which provides insight into the infrastructure availability of critical applications such as the Siebel customer relationship management system and Oracle business applications. With the ability to monitor critical infrastructure components in greater detail and from a central console, APC reduced problem resolution time, streamlined infrastructure management costs by U.S.$100,000 annually, and reduced licensing software costs by $50,000 annually.

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.

With an important trade show only two months away, automated microanalysis solution provider ASPEX Corporation had only a short time to add rich reporting and graphing functionality to its Perception MQA (Metal Quality Analyzer) software. The company used ComponentOne Studio for WinForms 2008—a suite of more than 60 .NET Framework components—to quickly and easily add the desired functionality in only six weeks, meeting its deadline and saving roughly 75 percent in software development costs.

When a global retailer turned to the IT consultants at Avanade to redesign its e-commerce Web site, Avanade assembled an international team of experts—designers and project managers in the United States and application developers in India. The 11.5 hour time difference and network latency issues introduced a unique set of collaboration challenges. To address these challenges, Avanade deployed Microsoft Office Groove® 2007 software to the project team. The India team used the offline capabilities to maintain productivity even when network latency issues prevented them from accessing other Web-based resources. The U.S. team used the transparent discussion threads to quickly respond to developer queries. Using Office Groove 2007, Avanade expanded its collaboration capabilities across time zones and reduced issue response time from 4 days to 24 hours.

A world leader in electronic design automation technologies, Cadence Design Systems communicated with its customers through two Web sites, a corporate Web site, and a community site where Cadence software users could share best practices and resources. To expose prospective customers to its user community and better connect its employees with customers, Cadence wanted to integrate the two sites. Building a single Web site with Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and Community Server by Telligent, Cadence incorporated product, company, and user information with blogs, forums, and other social networking features. The integrated site meets the Cadence brand promise of being an indispensible partner to drive customer success, while exposing community content, enhancing the Web-site experience, and making content and contact management more efficient and effective.

Handheld technology is transforming the hospitality industry, and soon the pencil and order pad may become relics of the past. Cash Systemes Industrie recently introduced P.D.A. CSI, a point-of-service terminal that sits in the palm of your hand. Running on Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3, the device features fast Wi-Fi connections so staff can service customers seated outdoors, as well as an innovative user interface that lets users tilt the screen for a different perspective on table layouts.

Dell relies on its public Web site, Dell.com, as a key channel for its direct sales. To help customers more easily find the information they need and to simplify site management, Dell decided to redesign the underlying architecture of the site. It chose a solution based on Microsoft products and technologies, including Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, FAST™ enterprise search technology, and the Microsoft .NET Framework. With this new solution, Dell can provide a more personal, efficient shopping experience that builds customer loyalty and helps ensure the completion of purchases. The solution also reduces the need to involve the IT department in Web content management. Finally, by transitioning to a Microsoft-based environment, Dell is confident that it has implemented a foundation that it can expand and extend to meet its ever-evolving business requirements.

As one of the world’s leading computer manufacturers, Dell knows how critical client computers are to business productivity and success. Dell is planning to upgrade its 100,000 desktop and portable computers to the Windows® 7 operating system to reduce desktop management costs and enhance data security. Dell has been impressed with Windows 7 performance, especially on portable computers.

To serve its global customer base, Dell sends millions of communications to customers each day. In the past, templates for those communications were created and maintained by developers, requiring Dell business users to rely on the company’s IT staff whenever changes were required. To improve efficiency, Dell used Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 and Microsoft Office Word 2007 to develop its internal Global Customer Interactions solution, which the company is just starting to deploy. By enabling business users to create and manage their own templates, the solution is expected to help them meet their own needs in days instead of months, and to allow Dell to reallocate IT resources to new tasks. Dell was able to develop the solution quickly and anticipates a rapid return on investment.

When Brad Hudon moved from Canada to California to join Sipex as Vice President of Information Technology, he was lured by more than the weather. After spending 20 years with Future Electronics, where he was Director of Software Development, Hudon was eager to bring his IT experience to this dynamic company.

ICONICS is a leading global provider of industrial automation software used to monitor and control operations. The company’s software commonly runs on industrial computers with touchscreens, where it needs to enable customers to visualize and interact with 3-D representations of complex physical systems in natural, realistic ways. ICONICS is meeting that need by building on new features in Windows 7 such as support for multitouch, Jump Lists, and the Windows Taskbar, which enable users to interact with its software using natural gestures and fewer steps. By “lighting up” its software on Windows 7 in these ways, which took very little developer effort, ICONICS is providing a richer application experience for its customers and is gaining a strong market advantage over its competitors.

InFocus is a leader in the digital-projection market and a globally known brand. To compete more effectively and profitably in a challenging market, the company made a strategic decision to outsource its manufacturing operations and reduce overhead. To facilitate such change, InFocus decommissioned its Oracle software environment and built a business-aligned infrastructure with Microsoft Dynamics AX as a key element. To support sales and drive revenue, the company deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Since then, the company has increased productivity by 125 percent and decreased annual IT costs by 65 percent. For Microsoft Dynamics AX alone, InFocus has achieved an annual savings of U.S.$1 million and a full return on investment in less than 24 months. In addition, the company’s sales team has been able to sign up more than 70 new strategic accounts by taking advantage of the CRM system.

Intel is the world’s largest semiconductor chip maker, based on 2007 revenues of U.S.$38.3 billion. Looking for a unified communications solution to promote efficient collaboration for its global operations. Intel chose Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 as the best solution to meet its needs and has deployed it to all 86,000 employees. Intel Software and Services engineers have worked closely with Microsoft to ensure the software runs efficiently on Intel Xeon® servers and PCs with Intel vPro™ Technology. It recently deployed Office Communications Server 2007 R2 to take advantage of HD quality video, server-based audio conferencing, advanced voice capabilities, and user-friendly desktop sharing. Intel expects that the cost savings from audio conferencing and HD video conferencing will reduce conferencing costs by twenty percent and allow for even greater process efficiencies.

Invatec, a fast-growing medical device manufacturer, needed to standardize its global operations on a single, fully integrated business management system. For more than five years, the company used a number of disparate systems to handle core business functions. As demand for the company’s products continued to increase worldwide, the inability to automate processes hampered efficiency. After comparing several enterprise resource planning systems, including solutions from SAP and Oracle, the company opted to implement Microsoft Dynamics AX. Working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner MHT, Invatec deployed the solution to five of its locations across three countries in 10 months. The company has been able to increase the efficiency of its design, manufacturing, and distribution processes to ensure rapid delivery of its products while reducing warehouse operations costs by U.S.$150,000.

As one of the world’s leading software companies, Microsoft supports a global sales, marketing, and services organization of more than 45,000 people. To best serve customers and win new accounts, these employees need fast access to product information. Employees relied on a portal-based system to locate the information they needed, but the portal grew, and over time its nearly 400 sites became cumbersome to navigate. The company is now using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint as the foundation of a new information delivery system. Microsoft expects its InfoPedia portal solution to significantly reduce the time people spend looking for information and cut IT costs by 50 percent. Furthermore, InfoPedia is cost-efficient, as it requires little custom development or ongoing maintenance.

Microsoft, one of the world’s leading software companies, wanted to achieve a high return on the investment it was making in launch events for the 2010 versions of some of its most notable products. The company decided to host a virtual launch event to reduce the need for more expensive in-person events. It used Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 as the foundation for a source site, from which Microsoft can concurrently deploy 42 regional Web sites to showcase product demonstration sessions, discussions, and keynote events in streaming video, provide interaction with Microsoft employees, and deliver resource links to hundreds of thousands of viewers worldwide. The solution is highly cost-efficient, as it relies on an extremely streamlined development environment. Microsoft expects to spend significantly less than it spent on previous launch events, while reaching a much larger audience.

The Product Release and Security Services (PRSS) team at Microsoft wanted to centralize product release data, track customer relationships, and eliminate manual processes. The team implemented Microsoft Dynamics® CRM and the xRM development platform to build custom solutions. As a result, PRSS improved customer communications, increased release compliance to 98 percent, accelerated product time-to-market, and improved its ability to respond to business needs.

As part of its marketing and relationship-engagement activities, Microsoft hosted numerous events to deliver messages and grow relationships with Chief Information Officers (CIOs)—the primary decision makers for technology purchases. However, these events alone didn’t encourage peer-to-peer conversations or networking beyond the events themselves. As an innovative solution, the Microsoft Online Community team collaborated with Billy Fez Productions to create the CIO Network—an online Microsoft community site built using the Telligent Systems Community Server social network platform, which is based on the Microsoft® .NET Framework. In just a short time, the Network has become a popular forum for ongoing dialogue between CIOs and Microsoft, and one that fosters networking, relationship building, learning, and collaboration.

The Entertainment and Devices Division (EDD) at Microsoft needed real-time insight into its supply chain to meet production deadlines. It wanted to better support business processes, but its highly distributed, cross-organizational infrastructure limited visibility. To improve efficiency, the EDD implemented a solution based on Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2004 with Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for RosettaNet. It upgraded to BizTalk Server 2006 R2, and then deployed BizTalk Server 2009 to take advantage of support for Hyper-V™ technology and connect applications in a virtualized server environment. Benefits include better business agility and productivity. For example, with virtualization the division can deploy a new line-of-business solution in two weeks instead of several months. Also, it can use service-oriented architecture to build new solutions from existing applications.

Responsible for the graphics processor unit that drives the Xbox 360® video game and home entertainment system, the Silicon Operations (SiOps) group at Microsoft coordinates a complex supply chain that includes many suppliers and contract manufacturers. SiOps worked with Microsoft® Certified Partner Kineticsware and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Sonata Software to upgrade its Microsoft Dynamics™ AX business management software. The partners used the Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step Methodology to facilitate collaboration across geographies and time zones, resulting in a seamless transition that preserved extensive custom integrations. The updated Microsoft Dynamics AX implementation provides enhanced reporting and alerting features to help with supply chain management and financial tracking, as well as simpler inclusion of new vendors and suppliers into the supply chain.

Microsoft Corporation is comprised of hundreds of internal organizations and business groups, each focusing on a particular aspect of the business. Certain groups address the needs of the various customer segments – large enterprises, small and mid-sized businesses and consumer – that Microsoft serves, while others focus on particular Microsoft products and distribution channels. In addition, Microsoft also has organizations that oversee geographical regions and the subsidiaries in the countries within those regions.

As a tool that enables people to visually connect ideas and information, Mindjet’s MindManager 8 for Windows needs to enable users to interact with that information in ways that are fast and intuitive. To better meet that need, the company added support for several new features in Windows 7. Mindjet took advantage of multitouch gestures to make the user experience more fluid and natural, used Windows Taskbar thumbnail previews to facilitate working with several maps at once, and built on Jump Lists to provide faster access to common tasks—all contributing to a more natural, intuitive, and productive user experience. The company was able to deliver its updated version of MindManager quickly and cost-effectively, and expects the new release of its flagship software to help drive new sales.

NEC did not just want to enter the market for digital place-based advertising—the advertising that appears on screens in malls, airports, and other venues. It wanted to expand that market by changing how advertisers and network operators do business. To do that, NEC is about to launch a pair of Web-based applications that largely automate the manual processes that make up the traditional ad campaign. These include identifying potential ad networks, negotiating placement, managing the final product, and reporting on ad play. To create a fully functional, robust solution quickly and cost effectively, NEC turned to Microsoft technologies and Project Leadership Associates, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. NEC expects its digital solution to increase both the effectiveness of ad campaigns and the revenues of the networks hosting them—and to deliver the fastest payback in NEC history.

NEC Personal Products designs, manufactures, and sells personal computing products to customers around the world. The PC business is extremely competitive and requires efficient operations so the company looked to enhance competitiveness through investments in IT. After making many investments in technology to improve operations within departments, NEC Personal Products felt that it could benefit from a solution to improve communications and collaboration across the entire company. In December 2008, the company completed its Integrated Collaboration and Unified Communications programs which involved deploying Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and Microsoft Office Professional 2007. This fully interoperable solution for communications and collaboration helps the company to improve business processes.

Founded in 1983, Network Equipment Technologies (NET) is a leader in providing network and voice exchange solutions for government and enterprise customers worldwide. To increase its operational efficiency, cut costs, and improve government reporting and compliance capabilities, NET needed to implement a new enterprise resource planning system. For nearly a decade, the company relied on a business management solution from Oracle, which proved difficult to integrate and costly to manage. After a thorough evaluation process, NET engaged Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Fullscope to facilitate implementation of Microsoft Dynamics™ AX. Using Microsoft Dynamics AX, NET has increased the speed and accuracy of its sales order process, improved its government-contract compliance capabilities, and has estimated savings of U.S.$1.5 million compared to its Oracle system.

Precision is the business of Nikon, a Japanese technology corporation. Whether dealing with a high-resolution camera or a scientifically precise microscope—the point is to always focus on the details. Before, Nikon GmbH Deutschland had a less detail-oriented approach to customer data. Data was distributed across several systems, which was more of a hindrance than a help to sales. Staff lacked important information during customer visits and found that routine tasks like preparing sales reports were a lot of work. Nikon decided to address these issues with professional CRM software. Nikon now is using Microsoft Dynamics® CRM for quick and simplified collection of data, which has resulted in better quality in the reporting system. Management now has much more sales information available for decision making. Also, more efficient business processes have resulted in additional timesavings.

Numonyx, a newly formed innovator of nonvolatile memory solutions combining the flash memory assets of Intel and STMicroelectronics, had just 80 days to create a public Web presence for customers and a collaboration intranet for its 7,000 employees. An extraordinary public site would establish brand value from day one. The internal site would forge a new corporate culture for employees from parent companies on two continents. Numonyx created a dynamic solution within its aggressive deadline by implementing Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Employees modify site content in real time, rather than waiting days or weeks for IT assistance—key in this fast-paced industry. Customers receive news while it is fresh, enhancing the Numonyx reputation for customer orientation and increasing return traffic. Internally, employees share information instantly, no matter where they are located.

ASIC manufacturer Open-Silicon needed a better way to track yields. So, it turned to an integrated financial and supply-chain management solution from Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Tensoft. The solution, including Microsoft Dynamics® GP and Tensoft Fabless Semiconductor Management, reduces costs by up to 15 percent or more, gives customers visibility into order status, and provides better customer service more cost-effectively.

To fully standardize its sales processes and improve the rigor of sales reporting, Panduit—a leading manufacturer of comprehensive physical infrastructure solutions based on the Unified Physical Infrastructure℠ approach—needed a new customer relationship management system. Panduit experienced challenges with its two previous customer relationship management deployments. In each case, adoption was low, which complicated lead tracking, limited opportunities for coordinated selling, and blunted the effectiveness of performance evaluation. Panduit searched for a customer relationship management system that was easy to use and cost-effective to deploy and extend. After implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM in only 60 days, Panduit has increased its sales force productivity by 15–20 percent and expects payback on its investment in 8–10 months.

Plantronics is a leading designer and manufacturer of telephony headsets and an early adopter of unified communications technology. It had deployed Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 at its California headquarters, but the company’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) division was unable to access voice features because Plantronics EMEA lacked operational control of that deployment. Employees sometimes had difficulty reaching colleagues promptly—particularly mobile workers—and collaboration suffered as a result. With help from POSTcti, Plantronics deployed Office Communications Server 2007 for its EMEA workers. Now, mobile workers have real-time communication tools, and Plantronics expects improved collaboration to save 2,100 work days a year. Employees are also increasing their VoIP experience with Plantronics headsets, knowledge that they can use to increase sales.

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.

Looking to accelerate and gain better visibility into product development activities, Quanta Computer deployed PTC Windchill software running on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise database management software. Now, the company can monitor sales, engineering design, and production processes in a single system and can scale its business intelligence efforts to build its competitive edge.

Ricoh specializes in digital office solutions, comprehensive document solutions, and advanced electronic devices. To maintain its competitive advantage, Ricoh became an early adopter of the Windows 7 operating system. After the pilot program is complete, Ricoh plans to deploy Windows 7 to all of its 25,000 computers in a phased manner, and expects to benefit from enhanced security, greater employee productivity, increased power savings, and improved IT management.

Roland DGA Corporation is the U.S.-based marketing, distribution and sales arm of the Roland DG Corporation of Japan, a worldwide leader in the sign, graphic-arts, fine-art, photography, engraving and 3D-modeling industries. Roland distributes its products through a channel of nearly 400 dealers on a one-tiered distribution model. Communications with these dealers is critical, since customer satisfaction is essential to maintaining the strength and reliability of this exclusive network. Roland’s existing homegrown proprietary Employee & Dealer portal, used for maintaining these channels of communications, was reaching the end of its useful life and was at the point where it could no longer be maintained or moved forward without a tremendous expenditure of time and energy.

Samsung Electro-Mechanics is a global electronics parts manufacturer with production facilities in eight locations around the globe. The company measures productivity and competitiveness to increase its yield. In order to carry out this analysis, Samsung Electro-Mechanics deployed Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 and Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 within its Business Integration (BI) framework, mapped to its business models. Following its deployment, Samsung Electro-Mechanics has reduced time spent on product yield analysis from hours to minutes, and can perform a multi-dimensional analysis, which was not previously possible. These enhancements to the manufacturing process and reduction in yield analysis times mean Samsung Electro-Mechanics can rapidly and accurately run its business.

Samsung Electronics, a leading Korean company as well as a symbol of the IT industry, carried out an innovative project to strengthen its global Supply Chain Management (SCM) execution ability, gaining the industry’s interest. Samsung Electronics placed its emphasis on the business management scenario of predicting and preparing for future environmental changes and competitiveness, which is one of the survival strategies of an industry with an unpredictable future. The company is aggressively establishing the foundation for enhancing business management speed and efficiency-oriented business management innovations since early this year. In accordance with this type of scenario, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) Platform provided life to Samsung Electronics’ SCM system. Samsung Electronics decided to implement an action-oriented BI solution that enables on-demand changes of business management plans and reflects these adjustments. As such, it decided to deploy SQL Server 2008, which can satisfy all three major requirements of BI solution, including ‘performance and reliability’, ‘cube write-back’ and ‘user convenience’, and the company is thoroughly experiencing the benefits of this IT innovation. In the face of enterprise-wide application, it has completed application in only its video display business division, so it is still too early to mention any fixed quantity of benefits. However, with this system implementation, Samsung Electronics expects to increase its forecast accuracy for product demands by more than 20%.

In an effort to improve the customer experience and support worldwide marketing initiatives, Samsung Electronics began a redesign of 60 of its regional, public Web sites. A key requirement of the project was to improve search functionality to provide viewers with highly customized results. Samsung replaced its Autonomy Ultraseek–based search with FAST enterprise search. Now, Samsung is able to provide customers with highly customized results, such as products listed according to regional sales priorities. Customers also receive more accurate search results when trying to locate product information and software drivers—so much so, that Samsung reports a near 20 percent increase in the number of visitors who click through from search results to internal pages. The improved search enhances site performance and, with better technical support, is easier to maintain than the previous solution.

Siemens PLM Software scales to 5,000 concurrent users and gains 50 percent compression for database files running on SQL Server® 2008 and Windows Server® 2008 and Intel®-based hardware.

Sony Electronics provides audio/video electronics and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets. As part of Sony Corporation, Sony Electronics employees collaborate with colleagues in offices around the world. The company sought a more efficient way to organize and search for documents on the corporate intranet, while also making it simpler for employees to connect with each other and share expertise. By deploying Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and becoming an early adopter of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Sony Electronics has given employees advanced document sharing capabilities and a more effective and easily searchable intranet, saving time and boosting productivity. Ready access to internal experts also saves consulting costs, and development time on key projects has been cut from three to six months to three to six weeks.

Japan-based, high-tech manufacturer TDK-Lambda designs, manufactures, and distributes power-supply components. The custom Web interface for the company’s business intelligence application was slow and confusing for many employees, which resulted in poor usage. TDK-Lambda developed a revolutionary, new interface by using Microsoft® Silverlight™, a cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in, that enables line-of-business (LOB) Web applications to perform like desktop applications. Today, the Silverlight-based LOB application provides more than 90 charts that meet the company’s reporting needs for manufacturing, inventory, financial management, and sales, providing an experience that is radically different from a traditional LOB application. The new Silverlight-based interface has helped improve usage rates and has become a catalyst for the creation of a new business culture.

For more than 30 years, Illinois-based Tellabs has been a major player in the world of telecommunications, with products currently installed at 41 of the top 50 global telecom service providers. Because Tellabs is similarly dedicated to helping its own employees communicate and collaborate effectively, the company recently rebuilt its intranet using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Now, Tellabs is providing employees with a single, central place to get information, with content targeted to readers based on geographical, functional, and departmental criteria. As a result, the company is reducing wasteful and redundant e-mail messages and phone calls, while providing more timely information to everyone and reinforcing its brand, vision, and strategy. It also is saving U.S.$50,000 annually in IT costs and positioning itself for the development of future strategic applications.

For Teradyne—the U.S.$1.2 billion a year maker of automatic test equipment—the recession posed the same challenge that many other manufacturers faced: cut costs while boosting customer service, the better to weather the bad times and position itself for growth during the inevitable recovery. The company’s multipronged approach to the challenge included the adoption of new processes for managing the requirements of product development projects, collaboration on project team documents, and change orders, implemented through Siemens PLM Software’s Teamcenter® software and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Now, personnel have faster and easier access to more accurate data, which has led to less manufacturing rework, lower scrap costs, faster change-order cycles, lower project scheduling slip rates, lower change-order processing costs, and higher customer satisfaction.

Tower Semiconductor employees held customer and sales information in disparate systems, making it difficult to monitor projects and measure market demand. Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Advantech, the company deployed Microsoft Dynamics® CRM version 4.0. This integrates with existing systems, and offers clear, accurate data to help users manage project life cycles, make smart business decisions, and enhance customer support.

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.

Visual Numerics needed a way to efficiently parallelize its C# numerical library software—and thus realized the performance gains made possible by today’s multicore processors. The company continues to improve the performance of its IMSL C# Numerical Libraries by taking advantage of the support for parallel programming provided in the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 development system and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4. This support enables Visual Numerics developers to productively write scalable parallel code at higher levels of abstraction than they could by working directly with threads. The company’s efforts are yielding an almost linear increase in performance on multicore systems, positioning Visual Numerics as an industry leader in meeting the needs of Windows developers working in the field of technical computing.

In 2003, Xerox Global Services decided to build a Web solution that would centralize the hosting and management of many service-delivery applications, thereby enabling employees to provide better customer service and better manage customer relationships. Xerox Global Services built the solution—called Xerox Shared Services—on Windows Server®, choosing it as a Web and application platform for its familiarity, reliability, ease of management, and superior development environment. The company’s current upgrade to Windows Server 2008 with Internet Information Services 7.0 is yielding further improvements in those same areas, making the Web-based applications that thousands of Xerox Global Services delivery personnel and customers depend on around-the-clock even more reliable, more secure, and easier to deploy and support.