Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft selected Initiate® software for the Microsoft Individuals and Organizations (MIO) project to completely reform Microsoft’s global data infrastructure.

The goals of the project include enabling MIO to provide a composite view of all individual and organization data about customers, partners and suppliers while delivering advanced business-to-business (B2B) hierarchy management. As a result, MIO will help define the true and total value of each customer and also identify valuable customers within organization, even when they purchase through multiple channels. MIO will also improve:

• Customer satisfaction – provide a consistent customer experience at all touch points by improving self-service and enabling more complete, accurate views of all of a customer’s relationships with Microsoft
• Financial reporting – streamline reporting on un-parented and mis-parented accounts
• Field productivity – ensure synchronization of data across the entire Microsoft organization, including CRM, software licensing and financial accounting applications, helping sales reps greatly by presenting a better picture of existing relationships and potential for cross- and up-selling
• Privacy and legal compliance – easier to track and respect privacy preferences

The first phase of the project involved cross-matching all of Microsoft’s organizational customer data of approximately 44 million records with data from two external sources, Dun & Bradstreet and Info USA. The Initiate software serves as the MIO operational data store and provides dynamic composite customer views, organizational hierarchy management and data stewardship.

The second phase of MIO was implemented in less than six months and went into production as the trusted source for all Microsoft organization data in the United States and Canada, with over 1,150 transactions per second and an average latency of under 100 milliseconds. Phase 3 added support for Germany, France, UK, Australia and Japan, making Microsoft the first customer to take advantage of multi-language product enhancements in Initiate software.

Additionally, Initiate Systems designed and built a new B2B data stewardship tool. By MIO version 4 in 2007, the project will include all Microsoft individual data records, for a total of approximately 300 million individuals and 70 million organizations across 29 countries in 15 languages.

Intuit Inc.

Intuit is a major provider of personal finance and small business software. Primary products include Quicken™, Quickbooks™, TurboTax™ and accounting and payroll products. Intuit was founded in 1983 and currently has over 7,000 employees with major offices in 13 states, Canada and the United Kingdom. Since 1993, Intuit has had over 30 acquisitions.

Those acquisitions, combined with rapid company growth, had created an environment of unmanaged, redundant customer data that was difficult to leverage for business need. Inconsistent business processes across the numerous business units resulted in many disparate, unmanaged business policies regarding customer data management. For example, prior to engaging Initiate Systems, Intuit had over 100 million customer records from six different source systems and used two different CRM vendors, one for customer service call centers and the other for order management. Intuit needed a trusted system of record that would provide a single view of all its customer information and transactions, enabling better customer service and a more accurate picture of who they serve. Leveraging Initiate software gave Intuit the system it needed.

By deploying Initiate software, Intuit now has a trusted system of record that provides more complete and accurate information for its 90 million unique customers. Overall, Intuit is benefiting from a more accurate understanding of how many customers they serve.