REDMOND, Wash. — July 2, 2012 — Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. is announcing its decision to adopt Windows Azure to manage its Smart TV infrastructure. By choosing Windows Azure cloud technology, Samsung achieved significant reduction in costs, and an increased capacity to meet its growing customer base and higher productivity.

Samsung provides Smart TV service in 120 countries around the world, and more growth is planned. Samsung needed a solution that could support ongoing, reliable service and its continual increase in traffic. In addition, Samsung did not want to be dependent on specific suppliers. The company tested other products but ultimately chose the Windows Azure as the service infrastructure because it offered the required reliability to meet its mission-critical needs and its planned expansion of service.

“After extensive testing, Windows Azure is the only cloud offering that met our exacting conditions,” said an official at Samsung Electronics’ Visual Display Business Division.

Compared with the cost of expanding its in-house IT services, Samsung achieved a tenfold cost reduction by choosing to manage its infrastructure in the cloud. In addition, Windows Azure gives Samsung the ability to help secure the server and storage resources it needs quickly, giving Samsung the time to focus on providing high-quality software and services to its customers.

Samsung attributes this success to the scalability of its IT infrastructure, including Windows Azure, which consistently provides smooth, fast service. The company also observed greater speed of service in Asia, where it sees most of its Smart TV traffic.

“Samsung Electronics’ Smart TV is taking advantage of the unique capabilities of Windows Azure,” said Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of Windows Azure at Microsoft. “Windows Azure gives Samsung the ability to focus on its business rather than having its technical team deal with problem-solving and troubleshooting issues.”

More information about Samsung Electronics is available at the Samsung website. More information about how organizations are turning to Microsoft technology is available on the Microsoft Customer Spotlight newsroom.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.

BANGALORE, India — July 2, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that Wipro Technologies (NYSE:WIT), the Global Information Technology, Consulting and Outsourcing business of Wipro Limited, has migrated to Microsoft Lync Server 2010 for its ease of use and its single, simple-to-use user interface for real-time communication and collaboration needs. Lync Server 2010 is being rolled out to all employees in phases across all worldwide locations.

Since Wipro has a presence across multiple geographies, the company was keen to adopt a more optimal and seamless solution to enable better collaboration among users. In fewer than three months, Lync Server 2010 was deployed with go-live in November 2011.

“Lync Server 2010 provides us with a single solution for all modes of real-time communications,” said Ramesh Nagarajan, chief information officer, Wipro. “We also wanted the same solution to cater to our dial-in conferencing needs for users across the globe in different regions. This has been rapidly achieved for certain users in the U.S. and now is being planned for other regions, including India.”

Because Wipro’s employees work in many different time zones, the benefits of Lync Server 2010 were immediately apparent. With it they can do the following:

• Collaborate with co-workers anytime, anywhere using the Internet

• Potentially optimize costs using webconferencing and videoconferencing for interactive training

• Manage and finish projects efficiently with desktop sharing and real-time communications within project teams

“People really like Lync Server 2010,” Nagarajan said. “The seamless integration with Microsoft Office 2010 products, such as Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Outlook 2010, makes it much easier to use. In fact, the integration with SharePoint 2010 is so seamless that people don’t even realize that it’s happening, but they use it all the time. It’s natural.”

Lync Server 2010 facilitates better communication between stakeholders internally and externally. Employees are also finding time savings using Lync Server 2010. They can solve issues immediately instead of waiting to set up a call or meeting. “It’s convenient to reach out to people, especially with Outlook integration,” Nagarajan said. “I can see who is available on Lync instantly. I recently shared a screenshot with the security team; they wanted to determine how to find out where employees were in the event of an emergency. Lync Server can help with that.”

“This deployment has been one of the fastest large-scale rollouts of Microsoft Lync Server 2010 in India, and we are delighted with our association with Wipro for this solution,” said Karan Bajwa, general manager, Enterprise and Partner Group for Microsoft India.

More information about how organizations are turning to Microsoft technology is available on the Microsoft Customer Spotlight newsroom.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.

REDMOND, Wash. — June 29, 2012 — In an effort to take control of a paper-filing system that generated approximately 1 million pages per year, the San Diego County Juvenile Justice stakeholders — probation department, district attorney and public defender —adopted a custom content management and workflow solution using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

The juvenile court’s four courtrooms each preside over 25 to 30 calendar matters, including short hearings on detentions, dispositions, arraignments and similar matters, in rapid succession each morning — a total of approximately 25,000 hearings a year. Most of those hearings require a report from the probation office, which typically printed a 10-page report four times, once each for the judge, district attorney, defense attorney and court officer. In addition to the expenses and environmental waste associated with the county’s dependency on paper, it imposed inefficiencies on the attorneys, support staff, and their processes of preparing for and going to hearings.

“We’ve eliminated our share of the 1 million pieces of paper a year with e-files and SharePoint Server 2010,” said Jack Bucci, deputy district attorney and former chief of the juvenile division of the Office of the District Attorney. “That delivers a powerful green message to our own employees and to everyone who does business with our office. It also eliminates the time and cost involved in moving all that paper through the office. It’s a very elegant result of using Microsoft SharePoint.”

The county’s solution included development of the Justice Electronic Library System (JELS), a robust SharePoint Server 2010 site for the juvenile justice system’s 15,000 cases. JELS is organized into three highly secured business centers, one each for district attorneys, probation officers and separate public defender agencies, while a fourth center for the court is planned. Each business center holds its own set of 15,000 electronic case files — each an automatically created SharePoint subsite — for its stakeholders, making 45,000 electronic case (e-case) files in all. With JELS, the county is achieving its primary goals of eliminating paperwork and the often unproductive distribution processes associated with physical files.

Along with greater productivity, attorneys gained more effectiveness and flexibility, a benefit of JELS’ remote access capabilities. Case review can now be conducted any place at any time where SharePoint Server 2010 and the Internet are accessible. Bucci estimates that this added flexibility he and his attorneys get from JELS makes the professional staff 14 percent more productive, while the government benefits from a 50 percent increase in the productivity of its support staff.

Financially, the county incurred about $175,000 in initial system development and implementation costs. It estimates that during the county’s first full year of using JELS, it could decrease the staff (which it expects to do without any layoffs) that it needs to handle physical case files and other paper by the equivalent of roughly six full-time positions, avoiding about $360,000 in costs annually. Given its expected cost avoidance for the first full year of implementation, the county anticipates an initial ROI of about 100 percent.

“Some people think government can’t be as effective as business,” said Harold Tuck, chief information officer. “But we’re using SharePoint Server 2010 to avoid about $360,000 in costs, which results in a significant ROI. A lot of businesses out there would be happy to see that kind of return.”

Read more about San Diego County’s implementation of SharePoint Server 2010 in the Microsoft case study. More information about how organizations are turning to Microsoft technology is available on the Microsoft Customer Spotlight newsroom.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.