In line with its strategy for market leadership, international law firm Linklaters wanted its partners and managers to be able to analyse business performance faster and more effectively. The existing SAP solution produced reports suitable for the firm’s power users in HR, Finance, and Marketing, while other employees had to rely on improvised reporting techniques for insight into the business. Linklaters worked with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Information Management Group (IMGroup) to develop a business scorecard using Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Reporting Services. Employees can now view reports of the rich data contained within the company’s SAP system and share them across the organisation. This gives managers much greater insight into the company’s success and the people who drive it.

CROSSMARK helps the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry refine marketing efforts by gathering vast amounts of point-of-sale (POS) information into a data warehouse. As the company prepared to expand its biweekly POS data loads from 300 million rows to 4 billion, it needed a more robust extract, transform, and load (ETL) solution and an easier-to-use reporting solution. It upgraded its data warehouse to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 running on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. CROSSMARK replaced its Business Objects reporting application with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. Using SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, the data warehouse, which has grown to more than 3 terabytes, handles the 12-fold increase in data loads without expanding the loading window and gives the company a better view of its business

Homestore Web sites provide a national trove of real estate and apartment listings and other housing-related information for more than 9 million unique visitors a month. Believed to be the largest such operation on the Web, the company generates more than U.S.$200 million in annual revenue. To enhance the customer experience, the company created a data warehouse to analyze how its users explore its sites. Initially deployed on a Teradata system, Homestore migrated to a new data warehouse hosted on Microsoft® SQL Server™. SQL Server Analysis Services is used for creating multidimensional data cubes, and reporting is done using SQL Server Reporting Services. Migrating to SQL Server has provided Homestore with a number of benefits, including 20 times faster performance in processing Web logs, a richer reporting environment, the ability to provide faster internal customer service, and the agility to meet new needs.