Mobile capabilities like booking a hotel, restaurant, or taxi while on the go are essential for travel and entertainment (T&E) management solutions. Concur’s T&E solutions are available to its millions of business travelers through its mobile application powered by Windows® Mobile®. To diminish complexity for Concur and its customers’ IT departments, Concur Mobile was developed, and is managed with a rapid mobile application platform available from Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Pyxis Mobile.

Invensys Operations Management is out to make it easier and less expensive for small electric utilities in the United States to participate in smart grid, an energy modernization program supported by the U.S. government. Utilities need a high-performance, low-cost way to distribute real-time pricing data to customers so that they can make smarter consumption decisions. Invensys responded by creating a smart grid communications platform using The Service Bus and Access Control Service, both part of the Windows Azure™ platform. The resulting platform enables utilities to immediately embrace smart grid services at affordable prices. Such services will help utility customers save money by using energy more wisely. Invensys developed its pilot solution in just three months as part of a plan to realize increased revenues from selling smart grid–compliant products and services.

Responding to high numbers of deaths at sea in the fishing industry, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution contracted Active Web Solutions (AWS) to create an automated sea-safety application. AWS developed a location-based service infrastructure, code-named GeoPoint, which transmits position data to a centralized tracking and alerting system. AWS used GeoPoint to build MOB Guardian, a search-and-rescue application for fishing vessels. To extend GeoPoint to more scenarios, AWS migrated it to the Windows Azure™ platform. By hosting GeoPoint in the “cloud,” in Microsoft® data centers, AWS attained massive scalability, richer functionality, and lower infrastructure costs. AWS was able to quickly convert its application to a hosted service and avoid the expense of building and managing a data center. AWS also has the flexibility and scalability to offer GeoPoint to many more markets.

Cast Iron Systems specializes in helping organizations connect Internet-hosted (cloud) applications with on-premises applications. When Microsoft announced the Windows Azure™ platform, Cast Iron set out to enhance its Cast Iron Integration Solution with Windows Azure platform connectivity. Using the Service Bus and Access Control Service, Cast Iron created the needed connectors in just one day. Faster time-to-market enabled Cast Iron to supply a timely solution to an urgent need. Its enhanced product can help customers host applications off-premises without concerns about interoperability with on-premises data. With the Cast Iron Integration Solution, companies can now use application data wherever it resides and scale workloads without worrying about overloading the communications infrastructure.

The CaveDigital Board Meeting solution is enabling the City of Porto to be much more efficient in how it schedules and manages council meetings and how it has greatly reduced their use of paper.

The High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) provides computing resources to internal and external research and industry partners. The institute uses diskless boot technology for all of its 700 compute nodes to implement a compute cluster with Windows® HPC Server 2008. HLRS has found that using diskless boot technology in combination with the latest cluster technology leads to significant savings, thanks to the high energy efficiency.

Stork Thermeq, a provider of products and services for industrial water-steam systems, used a Red Hat Linux high-performance computing (HPC) system to support its research. But the company found that the system took considerable expertise to run and maintain, pulling researchers away from their work, and would have required outside consultants to expand and maintain the system’s structure. The company migrated to the Windows® HPC Server 2008 operating system because it provided greater scalability and easier management. Stork Thermeq also found that the system delivers greater cluster efficiency and flexibility because of the integrated Job Scheduler and because it performs 30 percent faster per node than the company’s previous Linux system. Due to the accelerated performance, Stork Thermeq researchers can run more compute jobs and gain deeper insight for improved products and services.

The Department of Physics at the University of Bologna needed to increase its computation speed for complex tomographic analysis of large works of art. After successful testing, it now conducts its calculations on a cluster that runs the Windows® HPC Server 2008 operating system. Doing so made it possible for university researchers to avoid rewriting code, reduce calculation times from 20 days to 6 hours, and expand into new areas of research.

Based in the United Kingdom, Betfair is the world’s biggest online betting community. To address issues with an aging operating system, such as system performance lags that negatively impacted employee productivity, the company decided to migrate to the Windows® 7 and Windows Server® 2008 R2 operating systems. Still early in its deployment, Betfair has increased system performance, improved user experience, and streamlined IT management.

RehabCare Group provides rehabilitation program management services for more than 1,200 facilities across the United States. The three IT staffers in the company’s Client Technology Services group found it challenging to efficiently manage its 150 applications and 2,500 desktop and laptop computers, while supporting a large mobile work force. By switching to virtualization using Microsoft® Application Virtualization and System Center Configuration Manager, RehabCare cut the time for large-scale deployments of new applications from weeks to less than one day, delivered application updates 80 percent faster for a savings of 1,200 IT staff hours per year, improved asset tracking, and enhanced reliability and service for widely dispersed employees. Just as important, it increased end-user productivity, freeing therapists to focus on patient care instead of software installations.