Case Studies

NBC Sports faced what one executive called a “singular challenge” in the run-up to its Web broadcast of the 2008 Summer Olympics: to provide an extraordinary experience for viewers, reach a desired demographic of online viewers, maintain the production values that advertisers demand, and in so doing prove that the TV broadcast model could be extended to the Web. To do all that, NBC Sports joined forces with Microsoft, MSN®, and a team of other partners whose developers used Microsoft® Silverlight™ and other Microsoft Web tools, technologies, and services to build and deploy NBCOlympics.com on MSN. The result was a strategic win for all involved. The high-production-value site broke all NBC Sports records for online traffic and audience reach, drove a new stream of advertising revenue, and proved that the NBC TV model for sports broadcasting could be extended successfully to the Web.

• 2000 hours of live video and 3500 hours of on-demand video
• 1.3 Billion page views, 70 Million video streams, 10 Million hours of video delivered
• 27 Minutes average visit time
• Extended the TV business model to the Web
• "This was a huge success for NBC Sports.” – Perkins Miller, NBC Sports.

Tata Motors is India’s largest automobile company, and one of the world’s largest manufacturers of commercial vehicles. The company’s most recent passenger model, the Tata Nano, was announced in January 2008. Nicknamed “the world’s cheapest car,” the Nano was designed to make vehicle ownership affordable for average Indian citizens. To help manage the tremendous interest in the Nano, and to help facilitate its online booking process, Tata Motors used Windows® Presentation Foundation to build and deploy an interactive, in-store user experience, featuring detailed photographs and videos of the Nano. The company took that same experience and repurposed it for the Web using the Microsoft® Silverlight™ browser plug-in. These two solutions helped generate more than 200,000 bookings for the Nano and positioned Tata Motors as a company on the leading edge of technology.

• Launched 'The People's car' in January 2008 with huge demand
• Online lottery booking necessary to secure vehicle
• Silverlight 2 & WPF delivered immersive online experience developed in 15 days
• 450 dealers, millions of online customers
• "It's a great way to give customers an understanding of our products" - Tata Motors

Continental Airlines stands out from its competition through a commitment to superior customer service and a forward-thinking approach to technology. At Continental, technology not only enables business decisions, it drives them as well. When it came time to update its call center reservations system, the company looked for technologies that would offer improved functionality and also would adapt easily to changing business demands. Along with its partner Infusion Development, Continental built a new reservations solution as a Rich Internet Application based on Microsoft® Silverlight™. The new system provides improved functionality and workflow for customer service agents. With the new solution, Continental saves money by consolidating servers and databases that currently sit in call centers around the world. By choosing Silverlight, the company also has reduced development and deployment time, simplified application management, and made it easy to integrate the new system with Continental’s existing Web services.

• Re-developed call centre reservation system in Silverlight
• Up to 1,100 concurrent users processing up to 70,000 calls a day
• Cost savings delivering a Web based application to Remote agents
• Enabled agents to deliver enhanced Customer Service
• s “I can’t overestimate how important .NET has been in terms of providing a common platform that we can standardize on across the enterprise"