Global management consulting, technology services, and out-sourcing company Accenture was at a crucial business juncture. When it separated from its parent company in 1999, Accenture had to create its own internal IT organization. Accenture inherited its parent company’s disparate technologies and hundreds of specialized global applications, but it quickly realized it needed to improve upon these systems and services to serve a rapidly growing global employee base. One of its primary goals was to standardize on a common technology platform. Accenture now runs 99 percent of its global applications on Microsoft® technologies and, next to Microsoft, is one of the largest companies to rely almost solely on Microsoft technology. Partnering closely with Avanade and Microsoft, Accenture created a simplified technology environment that is more flexible and cost-effective than ever before.

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.

Germany’s TUEV NORD Group, one of that countries largest technical service providers, offers a wide range of consulting, testing, and servicing activities with its Systems, Mobility, Certification, Energy and Systems Engineering, Academy and International Divisions. The company serves customers in 36 countries in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. The TUEV NORD Group needed to replace its 32-bit system with a 64-bit solution. The company upgraded its database supporting the SAP BW to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition. The company saw a 15 percent performance increase after upgrading to SQL Server 2005, enhanced availability with Database Mirroring, readiness for 64-bit architecture, and enterprise-grade stability.

Microsoft Corporation, the world's largest software development company, has annual revenues exceeding U.S.$34 billion and operations in 89 countries. As with other global companies, Microsoft has lots of taxes to track and pay—on the local, regional, national, and international levels. The Microsoft IT Tax and Audit Product Group created a 1.8 terabyte Tax Data Warehouse to keep track of financial information. To enhance performance, the company upgraded its Tax Data Warehouse to the beta edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 from SQL Server 2000. Since the upgrade, the company has seen a 75 percent reduction in the time required to process online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes; 50 percent faster extract, transform, and load (ETL) data processing time; and enhanced developer productivity. The company also reduced migration time by half, and enjoyed a 25 percent server consolidation.

Dimension Data has operations in 36 countries as it provides IT services to a global customer base that includes 125 of the U.S. Fortune 500 and 32 of the top 100 listed companies in the UK. The company, which generated 2006 revenue of U.S.$3.1 billion, initially deployed its SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning solution using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 database. It upgraded to SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition running on Intel® Xeon® processor based servers to gain the high availability benefits of SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring, which creates a continually updated copy of data to a separate server for disaster recovery. The company is using the SQL Server 2005 Database Snapshot feature to create a dedicated copy of the database for reporting so that queries aren’t run against the production servers. The Online Indexing feature reduces the need for scheduled downtime.