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Eli Lilly has created a system of electronic lab notebooks that lets researchers at the pharmaceutical company document the design, execution, and conclusions of their experiments. With more than 800 scientists using the system, it has improved productivity by giving them a knowledge base of more than 150,000 experiments through which they can search. By accessing a central repository, scientists across multiple R&D sites can see the same experiment information and collaborate in real time or offline. The next steps: integrate it with other key software initiatives, deploy it more broadly, and extend it to partners.

Raytheon's Space and Airborne Systems group designs aircraft and spacecraft equipment that requires extensive testing that involves analysis of simulation data. These tests were becoming a major time suck on engineers' desktop computers.

IT's solution: a compute cluster—a supersized calculator and file server—that lets engineers off-load analysis jobs, freeing their desktops and completing jobs faster. The system centralizes data, analysis code, and data analysis efforts, fostering collaboration. And with a Web interface, engineers can initiate sessions from any browser-based platform. The company estimates it's saving $185,000 over three years in engineers' time.

Database management vendor Sybase faced the possibility of having to increase the power and cooling capacity of its data center at a minimum cost of $8 million. Instead, it launched a virtualization and rationalization project that will reduce the number of servers it's using by about 45%, thus letting it remain within the current power and cooling capacity of its data center for another 10 years.

Sybase used VMware Virtual Infrastructure for its Intel servers and IBM Logical Partitioning for its RISC-based Unix applications. It went with Sun virtualization for some Solaris apps, and others were converted to run on Linux in a virtualized environment. It also consolidated the systems it uses for software development to cut down on power use. The company expects to garner at least $1 million to $2 million per year in operational savings, as well as not having to undertake a costly data center upgrade.

Food services provider Aramark is giving sports fans a new way to pay for food, drinks, and souvenirs at sports events. Customers who buy its Loaded Ticket can add dollars beyond the cost of admission and then use the card and the additional dollars to pay for these extras. It's convenient for customers, and as a result, and fans are spending more inside the arenas. Aramark also uses the tickets to forecast sales and anticipate staff and product needs.

IBM has a new Web prospecting tool that gives its sales force access to data on 2 million companies. OnTarget integrates third-party data, as well as data from IBM's marketing intelligence and CRM systems, to create these profiles. It identifies companies that are potential customers and assesses what existing customers are likely to buy next.

Another new tool—the Market Alignment Program—coordinates sales resources with market opportunities. MAP displays historical revenue, revenue goals, and sales resource allocation data. Data can be filtered by geography, industry, customer accounts, and sales teams. MAP helps IBM focus resources and set sales objectives.

Truck and truck parts manufacturer Paccar found that conventional approaches to security were keeping it from providing customers with more information about its supply chain. The company decided to focus on securing its systems at the data level. It outsourced basic perimeter security, including spam control, antivirus, and intrusion detection, freeing its IT unit to put its efforts into innovation in other areas, such as telematics, supply chain integration, and mobile retail sales.

Paccar secures data at a granular level, classifying it consistently across the company and encrypting it based on sensitivity. It previously encrypted data on laptops, desktops, and documents; now it also encrypts e-mail and data on backup tapes, handheld devices, and print, scan, and copy equipment.

By structuring the security infrastructure in this way, IT can respond quicker and handle a higher volume of business unit needs, thus lowering costs and increasing the pace of innovation.

JPMorgan Chase's data protection, while adequate, didn't provide the extreme resiliency and adaptability to emerging technology that the financial services provider needed. Its Data Protection Initiative changed that, centralizing data management for more than 400 sites worldwide.

Data is compressed and sent to core sites, where it's replicated to a centralized bunker using a virtualization strategy that eliminates the need for local tapes. This approach cut the tape backup infrastructure by 40%, improved floor space use by 50%, and made it easier to restore data.

The system, which went live with multiple petabytes of backup data, had an added benefit: Much less sensitive personal data leaves JPMorgan Chase locations in an exposed format such as on tapes. More than 300 employees and nearly 200 vendor personnel participated in this effort.

Security was a high priority when online investment firm Scottrade built a new data center last year. But it didn't want to compromise speed, performance, or availability of trading capabilities on its Web sites either.

Scottrade took a layered approach to security, implementing network and database firewalls, a network intrusion prevention system and anomaly detection, host-based intrusion protection, and strong security policies. But it went one step further than many companies, adding secure operating system configurations. It also used a segmented pod architecture, so it can shut down portions of the network without disrupting other parts.

When severe rain and hail knocked out power to 52,000 customers on May 3, 2006, Austin Energy was glad it had just installed its first SOA application—AECall—which links the utility's outage management, billing, and call center systems. It processed more than 20,000 calls per day for three days during and after the storm; the system it replaced hit capacity at 4,000 calls a day.

AECall uses five Web services to query multiple databases that contain information on customers and incorporates that information into the outage restoration application. Austin Energy's SOA will integrate apps across the company and eliminate redundant legacy systems. Next up are Web services to link digital maps to the application that its 600 mobile crews use to respond to customer calls. Austin Energy used IBM's Rational development tools to reengineer its 72 major business processes.

Applied Industrial Technologies' transactional data was scattered across several applications and platforms. The industrial parts distributor didn't use an ERP application, instead relying on whatever product was most cost-effective for each business process. That meant Applied had a mix of commercial and custom applications that didn't talk to each other, making combining information across apps difficult.

All applications fed information into Applied's data warehouse, but the company used a proprietary client that was difficult for remote users—90% of Applied's staff—to access. It also required customization for specific views of data. The company changed all this with its InfoPort business intelligence portal, a J2EE application deployed on an IBM WebSphere cluster, running Red Hat Linux. The Web app is accessible from any network connection and lets users develop views of information without IT involvement.

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