Avanade
As its business grew rapidly, IT consultancy Avanade watched its data centers fill up with servers, which caused hardware, energy, and management costs to soar. To put a halt to runaway server growth and rising data center costs, Avanade deployed the Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise operating system with the Hyper-V virtualization technology. It is virtualizing even its most demanding workloads, including databases running the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software. As a result, Avanade will cut servers by 85 percent, reduce data center costs by 40 percent using Microsoft System Center, and improve database performance by 50 percent. Avanade is also a more agile organization now, with the ability to create virtual machines on demand to serve dynamic business needs.