REDMOND, Wash., July 25, 2002 — Today, during Microsoft Corp.’s Financial Analyst Meeting, Paul Flessner, senior vice president for the Enterprise Servers Group at Microsoft, reiterated the tremendous gains Microsoft®
.NET Enterprise Servers are achieving in the enterprise. At a time when database sales are either flat or decreasing, Microsoft SQL Server
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had another great quarter. It has achieved better than 20 percent revenue growth year over year, marking 36 consecutive quarters of growth. During the fourth quarter, ending June 30, 2002, the strongest drivers in SQL Server’s growth were the Enterprise Edition and the per-processor licensing common in enterprises. SQL Server, reportedly the fastest-growing database, experienced 17.8 percent growth* in worldwide rational database management systems (RDBMS) new license sales, and is the leading price/performance database on the market.
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Microsoft Windows®
2000 Servers provide an integrated platform that delivers innovation, manageability, scalability and agility to customers today. For these reasons and more, financial companies, including the ones below, turn to Microsoft to provide their data management solutions.
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Commonwealth Securities Ltd. (CommSec) . Australia’s largest stockbroker, CommSec, selected the Microsoft platform for its reliability, cost-effective scalability and greater flexibility. “Over the last year, my thinking has turned around 180 degrees,” said Michael Blomfield, deputy general manager for CommSec. “Not only does our new Microsoft-based solution give us the scalability we need more cost-effectively than Solaris, but it provides a much greater level of agility in bringing new functionality to market and responding to rapidly changing business needs. It was clearly instrumental in getting our straight-through processing solution completed on time and within budget.”
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i-Deal. SQL Server provides an ideal combination of robustness, scalability and transaction performance. With the prebuilt XML and multilanguage support and comprehensive clustering, replication and log-shipping capabilities of SQL Server, i-Deal was able to build a solution in six months. “SQL Server 2000 was the only database that met all our requirements, and its prebuilt functionality contributed to our ability to get to market in half the time it would have taken on any other platform,” said Frank LaQuinta, CTO for i-Deal. “Selecting a database is a long-term decision, and I’m confident that SQL Server 2000 will meet every one of our needs moving forward.”
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Madrid Stock Exchange (Bolsa de Madrid). Bolsa de Madrid designed an automated trade processing system that enabled more trading terminals to be located at banks and brokerage firms, which provided better message routing and improved data management. According to Jorge Yzaguirre, Trading Commission coordinator for the stock exchange, “We created an Internet-based solution, called SIBE-Gate, by using Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server and Microsoft SQL Server for the database. This solution offered an improved client application and additional access method. In the first seven months of operation, we experienced zero downtime, which enabled us to increase our daily volume of trades and reduce our overhead.”
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NAREX. NAREX Inc. offers a range of Web-based solutions to the collections industry. The NAREX solution has 12 terabytes of consumer debt collections data in SQL Server 2000. The sophisticated data modeling and analysis software developed by NAREX helps companies improve their debt recovery from delinquent accounts. By the end of 2002, NAREX predicts it will have approximately 20 terabytes in SQL Server.
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World Bank Group. The World Bank developed an application to perform quick, powerful analyses on economic indicators for client countries using SQL Server 2000. “SQL Server 2000 and OLAP technology give us the ability to browse all this data in an extremely flexible way. It’s a powerful tool, providing the kind of data you need right now,” said Ronnie Hammad, senior economist at the World Bank.
For additional information on these customers and more, including ASB and John Hancock, as well as performance benchmarks, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/resources/casestudies/company.asp .
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 is the complete database and analysis offering for rapidly delivering the next generation of scalable e-commerce, line-of-business and data warehousing solutions. It dramatically reduces the time required to bring these applications to market, while offering the scalability needed for the most demanding environments. SQL Server 2000 is the next-generation database of the .NET Enterprise Servers and an integral part of the Microsoft .NET Platform. More information on Microsoft SQL Server can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/ .
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.
* Source: DBMS Software Market: Flat but Not Calm — Gartner Dataquest (May 2002)
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