Behind every luxury sports car produced by Aston Martin is a sophisticated IT infrastructure. The goal of the Aston Martin IT team is to optimize that infrastructure so that it performs as efficiently as the production line it supports. To meet that goal, Aston Martin is standardizing on Microsoft technology. The IT team chose the Windows Server 2012 operating system, including Hyper-V technology to virtualize its data center and build four private clouds to dynamically allocate IT resources to the business as needed. For cloud and data center management, Aston Martin uses Microsoft System Center 2012. With a single viewpoint into the company’s entire infrastructure, the IT team can ensure that PCs in the company’s headquarters and production facility are running reliably at peak performance. Aston Martin is a more cohesive, productive organization as a result.

Aviva, a leading provider of financial services worldwide, wanted to help customers save money by basing auto insurance quotes on the behavior of individual drivers instead of statistics. To better understand potential customers, Aviva needed to collect telematics data from moving vehicles, but deploying on-premises infrastructure was too costly and complex. That changed when it implemented a hybrid-cloud solution based on Windows Azure. The solution uses smartphones to collect telematics data that it stores in the cloud on Windows Azure SQL Database. It also integrates with an on-premises quote system and social media such as Facebook and Twitter. With this highly scalable, extensible and secure cloud platform, Aviva can bring innovative solutions to the marketplace with a rapid lifecycle, help customers save up to 20 percent, and reach customers through the devices they use every day.

Aisle7 is a wellness marketing company that helps some of the biggest food and vitamin retailers market health and wellness products more effectively. To lower its operating costs and speed new product development, Aisle7 replaced its VMware virtualization infrastructure with one based on Windows Server 2012 Datacenter and Hyper-V technology. The company gained access to a wealth of features that would have cost thousands of dollars extra from VMware and will allow it to delay a US$30,000 storage expense—a massive cash-flow benefit for the firm. Aisle7 used Microsoft System Center 2012 to create a self-service portal that developers use to provision their own server resources, which speeds new-product development. By using clustering and other Windows Server 2012 features, Aisle7 can more easily perform server maintenance and keep workloads running without interruption.

One of the world’s largest professional services organizations, with a worldwide network of independent firms, needed a global IT infrastructure—without a global-sized price tag. The solution: a private cloud infrastructure built on Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Pack 1. The organization is now building that infrastructure, with Windows Server deployed into preproduction. The organization anticipates speeding IT management processes, gaining fuller and faster scalability, increasing reliability, and reducing costs.

Four years of steady growth gave Brisbane-based Calibre Real Estate a promising outlook. The company had added 20 new employees and two branch offices. But continued growth and future profitability also meant the need for better IT. Calibre needed a cost-effective way to ensure productivity for its growing, largely mobile staff. Telstra supplied the solution with Office 365—bringing increased reliability, cost savings, and a scalable platform for growth.

The Xerox India Development Center (IDC) writes software for customers all over the world, including many Xerox groups. The geographical distance between IDC and its customers and the lack of modern development tools made it difficult for IDC developers to deliver quality code and fix problems quickly. IDC upgraded to Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate 2012 and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 to gain a modern development platform. It then upgraded to Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 to virtualize and replicate production environments and integrate workload monitoring with development tools. The result has been a dramatic improvement in developer efficiency, software quality, and problem resolution times. Because developers are happier, staff attrition has dropped from 29 percent to 10 percent in two years.

The existing server infrastructure at Ashok Leyland was being underutilized and becoming obsolete. The company wanted to decrease the number of physical servers and consolidate resources without compromising on business services. After evaluating several virtualization technologies, Ashok Leyland chose to consolidate and build their new private cloud with Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 R2 Hyper-V technology. As a result, the company plans to cut down the number of physical servers and make it simpler and easier to manage the data centers. Costs will be substantially lower because the need for hardware is much lower and similarly, power and maintenance costs will come down significantly. Overall, Ashok Leyland’s new IT infrastructure will assist in providing better IT services and boost business agility.

To succeed in the car rental business, you need low prices and great service. In many locations, customers can walk 10 paces to find the same car or a better deal. Europcar South Africa understands this well and has discovered that the secret to delivering superior pricing and service is having cutting-edge technology in the data center. The company recently created a private cloud environment—using the Windows Server 2012 operating system, Microsoft System Center 2012 data center solutions, and Dell hardware—to keep operating costs low and deliver new services quickly. Europcar estimates that it has boosted IT efficiency by more than 85 percent and reduced operating costs by 35 percent, which includes a 25 percent reduction in data center energy costs. It has also compressed disaster recovery from two hours to 15 minutes.

CSU Industries provides critical maintenance services to Fortune 500 businesses. It recently upgraded to the Windows Server 2012 operating system to take advantage of innovations that enable the provider to deliver uninterrupted service to customers, significantly trim administration time, and reduce IT costs by 50 percent. CSU also gained increased business agility and created a cloud foundation on which it can offer new revenue-producing services.

For Avanade, the Accenture/Microsoft joint venture that provides business technology solutions and managed services, it is not enough to use the latest Microsoft technologies to run its business. It also has to demonstrate compelling expertise in those technologies to win new business. The company saw the chance to do both with the release of Windows Server 2012, Microsoft System Center 2012, and Windows 8. Avanade created an innovative way to deploy Windows 8 worldwide, using Windows Azure, and then used the new software to give remote workers faster, easier, and more secure corporate access. Additionally, the company’s mission-critical Dynamic Computing Services—which runs a private cloud environment for development and testing solutions for internal and external customers—uses the technologies to gain the cost-effective scalability necessary to support a large and growing business.