Windows Server 2003 Application Server Case Studies

Roughly 40% of the Exchange’s revenues are generated by the sale of real-time information about stock and share prices. LSE replaced their existing market data dissemination system that supports this revenue stream with a new system based on Windows Server, the .NET Framework, and SQL Server. Truly mission-critical, the new system currently has the capacity to disseminate 3,500 messages per second, with a latency of 2 milliseconds per message, and an ability to scale to more than 100,000 messages per second. The new system has demonstrated 100% reliability. Of the Exchange’s 50 highest-volume trading days as of October 2006, 49 have happened since the new system went live in 2005.

CheckFree is known for its high-quality electronic commerce infrastructures used by financial institutions. The company wanted to lower its per-transaction costs, while still maintaining the levels of reliability its customers demand and expect. CheckFree initially had not considered Windows and .NET for its application server, assuming it was too immature. But after getting some eye-opening initial results, CheckFree selected .NET over IBM WebSphere, saying, “After conducting a comprehensive six-month evaluation, we found that the Microsoft solution was 24 percent better than the IBM/Linux solution in terms of total cost of ownership.” CheckFree also found the Windows Server + .NET solution to perform 14 percent better than the all-IBM solution on the same hardware. Finally, CheckFree was able to deliver a .NET solution in about one-sixth the time, as compared to a WebSphere-based solution.

In a later project, CheckFree demonstrated a particular application written on Windows Server, the .NET Framework, and SQL Server delivering 4400 transactions per second, over eight times its required throughput.

KT Corporation (formerly Korean Telecom) replaced their Operations Support Systems with a new system based on .NET running on Windows Server 2003. They evaluated J2EE-based solutions, but selected the Microsoft application server technology. "The advantage of the one-stop shopping Microsoft offers is very apparent on a complex project like this," according to Woo-Sung Kim, Ph.D., Assistant Vice President, Operations Support System Laboratory at KT. KT estimates it will save $90 million per year with the new .NET based system.

Thomson Financial selected Microsoft application server technology for its Thomson ONE system, migrating from numerous disparate application frameworks including J2EE, to a common service-oriented architecture based around Windows and .NET. The new architecture has helped the company enhance user productivity, integrate more deeply with customer systems, reduce IT and development costs, and accelerate time-to-market. "With Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, we get a single programming framework and tool set that can support both service layer and smart client development... Our productivity has gone up quite a bit since we moved to .NET….," said Jon Christopher, Development Manager in the Global Segments group at Thomson Financial.