Case Studies

Petroleo Brasileiro S.A. (Petrobras) produces, refines and distributes petroleum, gas, and derivative products and is the twelfth largest producer of oil and gas worldwide. The company also operates a research center (CENPES) where scientists use high-performance computing (HPC) technology to support oil-related research and development projects. In late 2005, CENPES was concerned about the time and effort required for its research staff to manage the 500 server computers included in its HPC systems. In response, the center deployed Microsoft® Windows® Compute Cluster Server 2003 on 180 of its servers. These servers can now be re-configured in minutes instead of hours, significantly improving researchers’ productivity. The research center also expects computational performance to nearly double, and, in addition, the solution can scale to support larger research projects in the future.

The Life Division of Pacific Life Insurance Company had a strong dependency between its business and information technology (IT) workers. The executives, business analysts, finance personnel, and customer service representatives who rely on corporate data to do their jobs had to frequently employ IT specialists to help access the desired data and put it into meaningful reports. The process was slow for business users and exceptionally time-consuming for the IT staff. To enable its business groups to be more self-sufficient and free its IT personnel from constantly creating business reports, Pacific Life deployed Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition with Business Intelligence features. The new solution has helped the company’s Life Division standardize its data infrastructure, ease data access and business reporting, improve business and IT efficiency, and reduce costs.

From its headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark, TDC provides land-line, mobile, and data communications services to customers in 12 countries. The company, which reported 2005 revenue of U.S.$8 billion, needed to gather data from more than 60 disparate systems into a central data warehouse to support some 2,000 business analysts and other internal users. TDC deployed its 6-terabyte data warehouse using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) database and SQL Server Analysis Services hosted on HP ProLiant DL585 servers with AMD Opteron™ Dual-Core 64-bit processors. The data warehouse provides the company with a centralized, authoritative, source of information across the organization. The cost of doing complex analysis, which previously required importing historical data from tape and working across disparate systems, has been slashed.

Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), which carries 40 million passengers a year, needed to upgrade its enterprise data warehouse it had deployed several years earlier using the DB2 database hosted on an IBM mainframe. The initial deployment had proven the value of centralizing data, but the warehouse was expensive to maintain, difficult to use, and couldn’t be scaled up without adding more mainframe processing power. After conducting a successful proof of concept test, Scandinavian Airlines is redeploying its data warehouse using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) hosted on an HP Superdome computer with Intel Itanium 2 processors. The new solution is giving the company a better view of its business, reducing the cost of computing, and providing the scalability it needs to grow into the future.

To comply with a U.S. federal directive to prove that its pricing for lumber was fair, Weyerhaeuser Company needed a way to quickly gather and analyze information from various technology systems. The company’s Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000–based solution worked well, but its processing speed left little time for the company to comply with the government’s tight timelines. Weyerhaeuser upgraded to SQL Server 2005, tuned existing processes, and now is able to complete data processing 50 percent faster. The performance improvements allow more time for analyzing the data to deliver accurate, defendable data is critical for compliance. The upgraded solution also takes advantage of integration between SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 for streamlined development, which saves steps every time Weyerhaeuser wants to change or add to its solution.

Health Management Corporation (HMC) is based on a great idea: If you help keep people healthy, healthcare costs will go down. HMC, a wholly owned subsidiary of WellPoint Inc., an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association and the largest health insurer in the United States, works with insurers to keep healthy those who suffer from chronic medical conditions such as asthma, circulatory problems, or diabetes. HMC develops predictive models from a data warehouse expected to reach 6 terabytes by the end of 2006. The program has been so successful that HMC needed to upgrade its data warehouse to support rapid growth, and to gain enterprise-grade extract, transform, and load (ETL) capabilities. The company upgraded to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition on an Itanium 2 platform, and is using SQL Server 2005 Integration Services for ETL.

FNAC is an innovative retailer that sells cultural and consumer electronics in stores and through its Web site. FNAC distinguishes itself from discount stores by having highly competent employees who have extensive product knowledge. To extend this high-quality and informative service to online customers, FNAC teamed with Microsoft and used the Windows Vista™ operating system to create a new smart client application for FNAC.com. Through this application, customers interact with product information as never before, greatly enhancing the buying experience. FNAC stores have also implemented the application on Windows Vista kiosks. Looking to the future, FNAC expects to deliver a more informative and consistent customer experience—both in stores and online—and looks forward to increased online sales.

The reservation system is at the core of an airline’s operations. Navitaire serves some 50 airlines around the globe with its reservation system, including industry leaders such as AirTran Airways, Jetstar, and Ryanair. When Navitaire’s existing reservation system, was approaching the limits of its processing capabilities for some of its largest customers, a change was needed. Navitaire upgraded to a solution using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) running on Intel-based 8-CPU 64-bit database servers. To address this need, the company developed a new reservation system, using Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 and the Microsoft .NET Framework. The solution gave Navitaire the scalability it required, enhanced performance, and simplified database management.

FileControl Partners, with its hosted FileControl Knowledge & Litigation Management System, helps Fortune 500 companies and other organizations around the world work with millions of pages of documents. Attorneys needing to research millions of pages of documents need incredibly fast full-text search capabilities to identify relevant information. To enhance search speeds across its more than 2 billion rows of data, FileControl upgraded its combined 1 terabyte of databases to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 (64-bit), replacing its earlier deployment of SQL Server 2000. Since upgrading to SQL Server 2005, the company has enjoyed full-text searches that run 25 times faster than before, and has seen a 300 percent increase in the rate at which it can insert new data. The company enjoys easier maintenance, as re-indexing that once took three hours is completed in less than 10 minutes.

With worldwide revenue of U.S.$22.9 billion, FUJIFILM Group is a leader in manufacturing and marketing a range of products for imaging, information, and document solutions. FUJIFILM Computer System Company (FFCS), a subsidiary of FUJIFILM Corporation, serves the entire FUJIFILM Group with IT expertise. As FUJIFILM Group prepares for its 75th anniversary in 2009, FFCS was tasked with enhancing data integration across the group’s 220 companies. Building upon the success of an earlier deployment of SAP running on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000, chose SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) for its Global SAP System. When SAP has been fully deployed to all organizations within FUJIFILM Group, SQL Server 2005 will be supporting several terabytes of data. FFCS has found that SQL Server 2005 is easy to manage, and provides the scalability the global organization needs.

Unilever, the global consumer products giant that sells some 400 brands in 100 countries, generating 2005 revenue of U.S.$50.6 billion, needed to upgrade its SAP R\3 supply chain infrastructure that was hosted on an Oracle\UNIX solution. Seeking a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), Unilever tested Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) using 1.5 terabytes of data and double the transaction loads of its U.S. operations. The company was so impressed by the results that it is deploying Microsoft SQL Server 2005 running on the Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition for Itanium-based Systems operating system, hosted on an HP Superdome computer to deploy mySAP 2004 to support its North American operations. Unilever expects a 15 percent reduction in TCO, and the scalability, agility, and reliability its operations require.

Sutter Health, a community-based, not-for-profit association of 26 hospitals and 5,000 physicians decided to screen to identify intensive care unit (ICU) patients who might be susceptible to developing deadly sepsis, an inflammatory reaction to infections. As an alternative to paper forms, Sutter’s internal developers created an electronic forms–based solution using Microsoft® Office InfoPath® 2003, Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition. The solution has helped hospitals to save lives for ICU patients who develop severe sepsis. Development of the solution took only 60 days and has proven popular with physicians and nurses because it is easy to use and provides life-saving data. The company also enjoyed a U.S.$900,000 savings from cost-of-care reductions, and $48,000 in labor savings within the first seven months.

Zillow.com™ is an online real estate service that helps people research the value of millions of homes in America. The company offers consumers free data and valuations for more than 65 million U.S. homes—and growing. When the company began building the database in 2005, the challenge was to find a product that could easily handle its very large data sets and deliver quick responses to user queries. After evaluating several database products, the company implemented Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition, which performed between 40 to 200 percent faster than its closest competitors. To back up its databases, the company chose LiteSpeed for SQL Server Professional, by Quest Software, which cuts backup times and file size by 50 percent. Both solutions help Zillow respond to customer queries quickly and save significant costs while being scalable and easy to manage.

For more than a decade, Navitaire has been a pioneer in delivering information technology and business process solutions to the airline industry. The company’s products have global reach and support a range of mission-critical tasks, including online reservations, revenue management, revenue accounting, and operations management and recovery. The company faced a challenge when the platform powering its industry-leading online reservation system, Open Skies, would be retired within a few years. So Navitaire began developing a completely new, online reservation system—New Skies—using the Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition database server, and the Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 operating system. To address its support needs, Navitaire acquired a Microsoft Services Premier Support Agreement. Premier Support has helped Navitaire conduct a technical architecture review, address Web server performance issues at a customer site, and obtain Microsoft Solutions Framework training.

DenizBank, one of the largest private banks in Turkey, needed to find a more flexible infrastructure for its core banking to make it easier to integrate and deploy new solutions to help it keep pace with its rapid growth. The bank is replacing its old core banking platform, which was based on UNIX and the ADABAS database, with a new solution that uses Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 as the database and Microsoft development tools, including the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0. The company has found it significantly easier to create new banking applications since moving to SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) and the new development environment. The solution has given the bank a unified banking environment and the agility it needs to quickly develop new applications to respond to market opportunities. DenizBank plans to use SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring to enhance high availability of its data.

ServiceU helps organizations ranging in size from small churches to Fortune 500 companies operate concerts, conferences, and other events with its online event management software, including ticket sales, event registration, and facility and resource scheduling. The company needed to ensure high availability of its services, and increase its scalability to keep up with its rapid growth. The company upgraded its database to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition Service Pack 1. The company uses the Database Mirroring feature of SQL Server 2005 to mirror its data at a geographically separate disaster recovery datacenter to help ensure high availability. ServiceU has reduced the need for scheduled downtime through use of SQL Server 2005 Online Indexing. Scalability has been enhanced as the move to SQL Server 2005 has helped reduce CPU utilization.

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.

Raymond James Financial needed to replace a data management solution that wasn’t keeping pace with the company’s rapid growth, including the planned deployment of 64-bit data warehouse applications for business intelligence. The company’s solution: the CommVault data backup and recovery solution running on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 operating system software. By centralizing and automating the data management environment at Raymond James, the solution has made data backups 25 percent faster, data restorations 75 percent faster, and the entire process easier and more reliable. The changes made the company more productive, saving time and money. Technicians have more time to troubleshoot servers, follow up on exceptions to backup reports, and perform restores that would otherwise wait until the next day—further increasing reliability and availability.

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. After a recent merger with Rheinisch-westfälisch, the company anticipates doubling its 2 terabyte SAP Business Warehouse (BW) by the end of 2006. 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. Upon completion of testing SAP BW on 64-bit architecture, the TUEV NORD Group will deploy the 64-bit version of SQL Server 2005. The company saw a 15 percent performance increase after upgrading to SQL Server 2005.

Network Appliance, IBM, and Microsoft have collaborated on a TPC-C transaction processing benchmark for a 16-way, 64-bit Intel Xeon MP-based computer using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit). The system, priced at a total of U.S.$3.14 million, achieved 492,307 tpmC, with a cost per tpmC of $6.37. This benchmark demonstrates the performance of SQL Server 2005 on NetApp RAID-DP storage systems and IBM’s new eServer xSeries 460. In addition, it shows how SQL Server 2005 is able to exploit technology advances from key vendors like Intel, IBM, and Network Appliance to deliver advances in performance and cost efficiency.

Denmark’s KiMs, one of Europe’s leading snack-food providers, needed a better way for its sales and delivery people to take orders and get the order information into the corporate system. Its better way is the Mobile Sales Assistant, a mobile order-entry solution based on a range of new-generation Microsoft® technology, including the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005. The solution is expected to reduce inventory loss by 75 percent, boost administrative productivity by 20 percent, and cut delivery costs by 15 percent. In addition, the 50 percent cut in development time and budget enabled by the Microsoft .NET connection software made it possible for KiMs to extend the solution to support both Pocket PCs and Tablet PCs. Use of mobile order-entry has increased about 25 percent since KiMs introduced the new solution.

When managers at Microsoft Corporation need information, they turn to a repository called FeedStore. As the largest software company in the world, with revenues exceeding U.S.$34 billion, Microsoft has critical need for the 2-terabyte FeedStore database. FeedStore, which pulls data from 39 internal sources and feeds some 500 subscribing applications, was running flawlessly on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Enterprise Edition. But the company upgraded to SQL Server 2005 in order to take advantage of the next-generation, enterprise-grade features, tools, and enhancements. SQL Server 2005 Integration Services for extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes is a major new enterprise-level feature being deployed for FeedStore. The company also wanted to take advantage of SQL Server 2005 database encryption to help protect personally identifiable information (PII) in Microsoft databases.

ASB Bank, a wholly owned subsidiary of Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), has a long history of innovative products, services, and operational procedures. When its parent organization decided to apply for an advanced level of accreditation for the international Basel II risk management accord, ASB needed to quickly assemble a packet of its own risk management information, processes, and policies to provide to CBA, as well as create a process for submitting periodic updates. To meet these requirements, ASB built a Basel II risk management data mart on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition. Using the new features and technologies in SQL Server 2005, the bank was able to meet the requirements in less than nine months, ensure the integrity of business processes and data, reduce operational losses, lower funding costs, enhance its existing risk framework, and reduce hands-on management.

MCI Enterprise Hosting, a Digex service, used a database solution based on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 to provide application management support services to customers. The demand for faster, more complex reporting led the organization to seek to improve its existing solution. Initially attracted to new features such as the PIVOT relational operator that expands reporting options, MCI decided to upgrade to SQL Server 2005. As a result, the hosting provider can run extensive queries and produce reports more efficiently and effectively, saving MCI database administrators significant time and effort. Plus, improved insight about customer systems, applications, and trends helps MCI offer added service and value to enterprise customers.

When the Commonwealth of Australia introduced its Welfare to Work initiative in May 2005, the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) systems group took on the task of creating systems to support the resulting new policies. At the time, employment-related data was stored in a Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 database. Anticipating that the number of transactions would double to 10 million per day, the systems group decided to migrate the database to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition to take advantage of increased performance, improved 64 bit support and memory management, new SQL Server Integration Services, and enhanced analysis and reporting services. The move has helped DEWR increase the value of its existing data, as well as gain increased performance, scalability, and productivity. It has also helped the DEWR systems group respond faster to support requests.

Facing massive data growth, longer processing times, and hardware reaching the end of its useful life, Bank Leu, a leading Swiss private bank, needed to upgrade or replace its management accounting system. To enable this highly complex system to keep up with the bank’s expanding business, Bank Leu and Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Trivadis built a solution based on Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) and using Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005. The solution is expected to increase the productivity of management accountants by up to 40 percent, enabling the bank to deliver more insight to users, while reducing data complexity. The solution is only half as expensive as comparable alternatives and requires merely 20 percent of the custom code that would have been needed without SQL Server 2005.

Imagination is a South African startup company that provides low-cost financial products and services such as life insurance and banking to people who normally cannot afford or access those services. To support its low-cost, high-volume business model and plans for rapid growth, the company decided to avoid the complex and expensive technologies often found in financial services companies. Instead it partnered with Fourge, a Microsoft® Certified Partner, to implement an IT system using Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005, BizTalk® Server 2004, and Visual Studio® Team System. The technology is helping Imagination achieve its business goal of tapping into a huge potential market while keeping its IT infrastructure scalable, flexible, and cost-effective.

The Puerto Rico Department of Health (DoH) needed a centralized way to track public health data, an improved process for retrieving healthcare statistics and reports, and to provide users with dynamic multidimensional analyses capabilities. With partner Nagnoi, Inc., the DoH planned a Data Warehouse for all of the island’s healthcare information, starting with data feeding from 11 of its most critical internal systems, including Vital Statistics, the patients’ Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system, and the Medical Assistance Program system. After considering several database options for the Data Warehouse store and a third-party tool for extraction, transformation and loading, the DoH selected Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition as its project solution.

Xerox helps customers manage office equipment, software, and supplies for some of the most demanding companies and applications in the world. Customers look to Xerox to provide highly measurable solutions to ensure optimal efficiency at the lowest cost. One of the key services Xerox provides is Xerox Office Services—asset management and on-going maintenance of large numbers of printers, copiers, multi-function devices and faxes. By optimizing such “print fleets” through highly specialized software and human resources, Xerox dramatically reduces the total cost of printing for its customers. To make it even easier and more cost effective for customers, Xerox developed a worldwide, centrally hosted, Web-based solution. Early adoption of Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 made development faster and easier, and reduced the complexity of the code base. In addition, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) contributes to the scalability and high performance of the back-end data center, and helps to deliver new levels of customer satisfaction.

When you are the largest software company in the world, with revenues exceeding U.S.$34 billion, there is a lot of sales data to track—and a global sales force eager to explore the information to devise sales strategies and to find ways to better meet customer needs. The Microsoft IT Corporate Strategy Planning and Analysis group provides a central clearinghouse for sales information with a 500 gigabyte (GB) data mart. When the group began designing a new ad hoc query application to run against the relational database, it decided to use Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 because of its SQL Server 2005 Service Broker and Table Partitioning features. Developers have found they can develop solutions 60 percent faster using Service Broker instead of SQL jobs to manage queries, and that Table Partitioning provides users with a 30 to 40 percent boost in query-processing speed.

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 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.

As one of the world’s largest management software companies, Computer Associates International (CA) provides software and services to optimize the performance and minimize the cost of IT systems for enterprises of all sizes. To further that goal, CA created a common management database (MDB) and is integrating it into virtually all of its management products to provide a common data repository and a centralized view of the IT environment. CA chose Microsoft® SQL Server™ as one of the database systems that the MDB will support, and is porting many of its products to SQL Server 2005 to take advantage of increased ease of use, performance, and scalability. With these improvements, as well as new integration features in Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005, CA expects to reduce overhead, streamline data management, and increase the usability of its tools for enterprise customers committed to the Microsoft Windows® environment.

As the largest health service provider in Israel, Clalit Health Services is constantly looking for ways to enhance health care delivery to its 3.7 million insured members. Clalit wanted to further utilize its existing Microsoft data warehouse with a data mining solution that will help identify patients who are likely to suffer from deteriorating health in the future. Upgrading its 1.5-terabyte data warehouse to a single instance of Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) from SQL Server 2000, Clalit is using a SQL Server 2005 Data Mining feature to generate predictive scores that can give Clalit physicians advance warning as to who may benefit from proactive intervention to maintain health. The data mining solution aims to help preserve quality of life for Clalit’s members, while reducing medical costs by keeping patients out of medical crises.

The Microsoft Finance and Operations IT group has internal applications to help Microsoft’s 37,000 U.S. employees self-service an array of payroll-related tasks such as viewing electronic pay check stubs, changing the accounts to which their pay checks are automatically deposited, entering time and absence information, and updating information on W4 tax forms. To enhance performance, the group migrated its application databases to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 from SQL Server 2000. For related financial applications, the group found performance gains of 20 to 90 percent, giving new life to legacy applications that had been slated for rewrites. The group has used new features, such as common table expression (CTE) and support of XML data types, to reduce some programming times from weeks to days, and to reduce the amount of custom code it needs to write, test, and maintain.

Document management can be quite a challenge when you are the world’s largest software development company with 57,000 employees and operations in 89 countries. Microsoft created a 2.1 terabyte relational database, which grows about 1 terabyte a year, to store, search, and retrieve some 3.5 million documents. To enhance performance, the company upgraded its document management database to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 from SQL Server 2000. Using exactly the same hardware and configurations, the company found 7 times faster full-text cataloging, and 3 times faster full-text searches compared with SQL Server 2000. The company has also enjoyed faster backups. Migration was seamless, and the company didn’t have to make any changes to stored procedures, tables, views, triggers, or other code. SQL Server 2005 works seamlessly with computers running SQL Server 2000.

The Swedish tool maker Sandvik Tooling, which has more than 15,000 employees in nearly 70 countries, needed a centralized reporting solution to help its managers monitor the heartbeat of the enterprise. The company created a data warehouse for reporting and analytics using the beta edition of Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services is used to create multidimensional data cubes for analytics, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services has made it easier for managers to create and manage their own reports. Reports that used to take three weeks to generate are now created daily. SQL Server 2005 Notification Services enables managers to set their own triggers for receiving information updates that can be sent automatically to a variety of devices, including personal digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones—a big help for those who travel.

The Coast Mountain Bus Company (CMBC) is tasked with managing the critical bus and ferry public transit systems that service more than 2 million residents in the Vancouver, British Columbia, area. The CMBC IT team is responsible for maintaining the company’s IT infrastructure, which supports a number of critical systems, including fleet management, financial and human resource (HR) management, and other applications. The IT team needed tools that would improve its ability to manage its data warehouse, create and manage critical Intranet portals and transfer data between applications. CMBC began to research new options after realizing that enterprise IT tools currently available could not adequately address these problems. The team tested Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 and Visual Studio® 2005, two key next-generation enterprise tools from Microsoft. The tools helped improve productivity and will enable CMBC to enhance other parts of its IT infrastructure in the future.

Experian wanted to provide its clients with an innovative. open technology environment that would integrate its capabilities in information, data integrity, targeting, and multichannel communications to enable the delivery of more comprehensive and cohesive solutions. Its MarketOne™ platform makes it easier for Experian to meet the varied needs of vertical industries and the segments within those industries. The MarketOne platform, which Experian developed with Hitachi Consulting, is built on a service-oriented architecture that includes a business intelligence solution based on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 and Web services. The business intelligence components of MarketOne are 500 percent faster than the comparable legacy programs and give Experian’s clients faster insight into their data for more effective decision making.

The Tax Services subsidiary of Countrywide Financial was adding more than 100,000 new mortgage-customer tax records to its database every month—and stressing its AS/400 system capacity. A new AS/400 would be a prohibitive expense and still leave the unit without the flexibility and reliability it wanted. The company chose a solution based on Microsoft® Windows Server System™, including the Microsoft .NET Framework. The company achieved first-year savings of U.S.$1.7 million—more than 50 percent—and expects annual savings on maintenance of $500,000. The development team got up to speed in one-third the time it would have taken on competitor systems, and continuing development is up to 50 percent faster. As the company takes more advantage of Microsoft technologies—for example, adopting Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit)—the solution’s performance continues to climb.

Capital IQ needed to develop its financial information-services platform quickly and cost-effectively to attract first-round investor financing. It rejected Sun and Oracle as too costly and time consuming. Instead, it built its platform—and its business—on Microsoft® Windows Server System™. The result is a highly sophisticated Web-based solution that includes Microsoft Office Excel® 2003 and Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 plug-ins so that customers can take advantage of Capital IQ information directly in the desktop software they already use. Choosing Windows Server System saved the company millions of dollars in development and scalability expenses over the past six years. Microsoft technologies enable the company to issue updates more quickly than its competitors, to organize its development program more effectively, and ensure growth for years to come.