ince its inception in 1975, Microsoft's mission has been to create software for the personal computer that empowers and enriches people in the workplace, at school, and at home. Microsoft's early vision of a computer on every desk and in every home is coupled today with a strong commitment to enterprise client/server software for mission-critical enterprise functions. Now that it has grown into a multibillion-dollar company, Microsoft is in an ideal position to use its own operations as both inspiration and testing grounds for its enterprise software. Under its long-held policy of implementing products internally before releasing them broadly, Microsoft recently migrated over 20 of its major business systems, including those for financial and customer support operations, from Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 to SQL Server 7.0. In so doing, Microsoft gained reliability, performance, and scalability improvements in its day-to-day operations, while also establishing the enterprise readiness of the newest version of its database management system.

Microsoft Puts SQL Server 7.0 to the Ultimate Test: Its Own Enterprise
Microsoft Corp. is the biggest software development company in the world: Its revenues exceeded $14 billion last fiscal year, and it employs 27,000 people in 65 countries worldwide. It continues to grow rapidly, too. Revenues increased 31 percent in fiscal year 1997 and 28 percent in fiscal year 1998. Not surprisingly, Microsoft demands enormously high levels of performance from its own information technology (IT) systems.

As one of the world's largest and fastest-moving corporations, Microsoft has long had a policy of using its own software in-house before releasing it as a commercial product. This self-testing process provides the company's product development staff with invaluable feedback to help optimize functions in new versions of software.

"It's the job of our IT organization to run our company on our software and to work with the product development teams to help think through the enterprise issues," says John Connors, Microsoft's Chief Information Officer. "It's safe to say that we're one of the largest users of SQL Server in the world."

Easy Upgrade, Early Results Validate SQL Server 7.0
Microsoft's transition to SQL Server 7.0 went very smoothly, and already the company is reaping tangible business benefits from the upgrade. Microsoft can now confidently assert, using its own multibillion-dollar worldwide organization as a real-world test case, that SQL Server 7.0 is ready for prime time at large enterprises throughout the globe.

Among the 20 enterprise databases that Microsoft has already upgraded to SQL Server 7.0 are three of particular importance to the company's business performance: the SAP R/3 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) environment, which manages Microsoft's worldwide financials, human resources, OEM contracts, and procurement transactions; Microsoft Sales, the company's revenue-reporting data warehouse; and the Microsoft Product Support System (PSS), used in the company's customer support operations to track calls, bill credit cards, and manage customer contract information.

SAP R/3 on SQL Server 7.0 Improves Financial Reporting
SAP R/3, three-tiered client/server ERP software, has been the backbone of Microsoft's business operations since 1996, when the company migrated from a VAX and AS/400 environment to a distributed client/server environment with SQL Server. The SAP R/3 environment runs all of Microsoft's finance, human resources, OEM contract, and procurement transactions around the world. Moving this mission-critical environment from SQL Server 6.5 to 7.0 represented an important and challenging aspect of the transition.

"We really needed SQL Server 7.0 for SAP R/3 to support both the database size and the performance for our large and growing number of concurrent users," says Connors. "At the same time, these crucial ERP functions could not tolerate any down time or transitional problems."

Already, SQL Server 7.0 has proven its worth with SAP R/3 operations, supporting the July close, which is actually the most time-consuming for Microsoft's finance organization since it follows the year-end close. Three years ago, before Microsoft implemented SAP R/3, the closing process took 15 to 20 days; last year, with SAP R/3 on SQL Server 6.5, it took about eight days. This year, it took four business days to close all of the worldwide Microsoft operations—25 percent as long as it took just three years ago and twice as fast as a year ago.