Case Studies: Professional Services

The Procurement Finance group at Dell is responsible for providing the Global Accounts Payable Group and management with the tools to track key performance indicators to ensure business objectives are being achieved according to plan. To gain better visibility into invoice discrepancies, Dell created a data mart hosted on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit), and accessed through a portal created using Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Creating its SQL Server 2005 data mart against Novora and the Accounts Payable dashboards using the Microsoft Application Platform has provided Dell with a number of benefits including enhanced visibility into its procurement accounts payable system, ease of use, 50 percent faster ETL with Integration Services, 9 times faster cube builds, and integrated development.

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.

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.

Acosta provides retail sales and category management services to more than 1,000 manufacturers, including giants such as Clorox, Heinz, and Nestle. To better manage its information, Acosta created a 2.2 -terabyte enterprise data warehouse based on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) SP2, and hosted on an HP 9000 Superdome computer with 12 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services was used to create more than 50 client-specific multidimensional databases. Deployments of the enterprise data warehouse and multidimensional databases are providing Acosta with a number of benefits including rapid ROI through product differentiation, better data view for clients, easier data management with Table Partitioning, enhanced performance with Dynamic Management Views, and 70 percent faster aggregations.