UNESCO—the Paris-based UN organization for Education, Science, and Culture—aims to alleviate poverty by helping people develop new skills. To do this, the organization looks to maximize internal efficiencies. It looked to replace its UNIX/Oracle-based SAP environment, which had come to the end of its life cycle, with an infrastructure based on Windows Server 2003 and supported by Microsoft SQL Server 2005. In addition to maintaining a high level of performance, the new architecture encourages innovation within the IT team. Administrators have eliminated the need for multiple passwords and created a single sign-on, which has improved working practices and security. UNESCO now has a platform to create even more operational efficiencies through business intelligence and analysis services as part of SQL Server 2005.

The Alaska Department of Revenue, Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) Division, managed a multitude of disconnected and continually failing technologies, housing several terabytes of data, with only a six-person IT staff. It needed a new data infrastructure to support its operations, which includes the distribution of between U.S.$500 million and a billion in dividends to approximately 630,000 Alaskans each year. Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition, the organization’s new data warehouse contains 15 million images of historical and current documents, and has the ability to scale to support the roughly 3 million images added each year. After deployment, the PFD Division was able to integrate disparate technologies, increase infrastructure reliability and scalability, greatly improve operations and IT efficiency, and will ultimately save hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

The Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games Corporation (M2006) needed a Web site to deliver schedules, venue and transport information, team and athlete profiles, photos, and up-to-the-minute news and results during the 12 days of the Games. Microsoft, the Official Technology Partner for the Games, built and operated the Web site between April 2005 and March 2006. Microsoft® Services consultants at the Microsoft Solutions Development Centre and local partners built the site on a wide range of Microsoft server software. During the Games, the Web site processed up to 10,000 page requests per second and reached a global audience of nearly 12 million. Research and past experience allowed M2006 and Microsoft to forecast the amount of content that would be generated and the number of people who would visit the site. However, as there was no definite way of predicting peak demand levels, the Web site needed to be built for scalability.