Microsoft had a couple of customers come and present to the analysts. The event really took off at this point. SQLServer was at the heart of Microsoft’s deepening relationships with both customers.
Not Circa 1990
First came Jeff Hays, market data product manager of Lava, a market data provider, a subsidiary of Citi. He told a great story about losing a bet. He explained that Lava was generating 60 GB of data a day and wanted an effective way to share it with partners. Although Lava is a Microsoft shop Jeff had not considered Microsoft for the project: instead Lava was looking at, for example, in memory database players.
“I was still stuck in circa 1990, thinking of SQLServer as a PC version of Sybase…”
The test was to transfer 70Gb of data in 3 hours. Microsoft engineers worked on the proof of concept and managed 70Gb in 45 minutes.
The bet, said Jeff, was… “if SQLServer does it then I will come to Orlando and tell the people, or Joe [the account manager] would buy me dinner.”
The answer- Jeff was here to talk to us…
Like a Virgin, Dashboarded for the very first time
Next up was Robert Fort, CIO of Virgin Megastore.
Times have been pretty tough in music retail. HMV, another major Microsoft customer, nearly went out of business recently as sales continued to fall in a tough music retail environment.
“Some of our competitors have disappeared. we’re reporting record numbers, and moving into new markets such as fashion.”
According to Fort, when he took the job, Virgin’s “aging” infrastructure wasn’t fit for purpose.
“We didn’t know our customers. We measured how many hits [the web site received], not how people navigated through the site. we didn’t have customer loyalty program.”
One of the major projects Fort initiated was a near real time data warehouse based on MS SQLServer. Probably the most interesting aspect of the project was Fort’s decision to roll out the 15 minutely updates to stores first, and management later. The strategy apparently paid dividends. Fort claims sales in stores immediately improved as shop floor staff responded to the new information they had at hand.
“In the first week every store improved. An $8m improvement, paid off first investments in 15 weeks. This was great user acceptance.”
I am not a huge fan of Microsoft’s “People Ready Business” marketing, but Virgin Megastore in the US seem to be living it.
Microsoft is a client in some areas of its business.
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