Abbott Laboratories www.abbott.com
Sales and Financial Data Warehouse Initiative
Project Lead: Peggy Mathias, Senior Manager HQ IT Applications, International Division
Project Description: Abbott launched an international sales data consolidation effort, developing a flexible information management infrastructure capable of accommodating future organizational changes and rapidly evolving business needs. The project integrated Kalido as a data warehouse, Oracle and PL/SQL for data staging, and Cognos for its reporting front end, providing 250 finance and marketing executives in 65 countries access to consistent, high-quality data.
Industry: Pharmaceuticals

Accenture www.accenture.com
Global Network Transformation Program to Enhance Employee Collaboration
Project Lead: Frank Redey, Partner
Project Description: The Network Transformation Program integrates IP telephony and data applications into one MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) network. When complete, the program will thread 14 technologies into one unified communications platform, providing Accenture's globally dispersed workforce with a wide range of collaboration tools, including telepresence, real-time document sharing, and PC-to-PC videoconferencing.
Industry: Services

Alfred Wegener Institute & Center for Marine Environmental Sciences www.awi.de/en/home; www.marum.de
Worldwide Geo-Scientific Research Data Sharing System
Project Lead: Dr. Hannes Grobe, Scientist
Project Description: Launched to provide the scientific community with a centralized repository of climatological and geological data, PANGAEA is a Web-based research portal, supported by Sybase as an RDBMS and analytics server on the back end. The repository catalogs 136 research projects with a total of 470,000 datasets, and 1.7 billion data points, making the 1.2TB of earth-systems data available to scientists through a general-purpose search engine that uses Google-like syntax. The system taps an inherent indexing architecture: Data is organized in columns rather than rows, allowing any field to serve as an index, thereby increasing search flexibility and query speeds.
Industry: Research & Development

America Online www.corp.aol.com
Highly Available Storage Infrastructure
Project Lead: Dan Pollack, Operations Architect for the Storage Operations Group
Project Description: In an effort to support its Xdrive consumer digital storage service, AOL created a highly available storage infrastructure capable of scaling to tens of petabytes. The storage operations group built Digital Bulk Storage Modules, consisting of Intel-based servers running iBrix Fusion software and a number of low-cost disks, and clustered the modules to ensure nondisruptive scalability.
Industry: Technology

Anthony MaranoCo. anthonymarano.com
Distribution Automation and IT Infrastructure Upgrade
Project Lead: Chris Nowak, Chief Technology Officer
Project Description: The family-run wholesale distributor of fresh produce built a cutting-edge facility to efficiently move more than 1 million cases of fresh produce each month. The company automated its paper-based front-office operations with a customized, real-time inventory management application built on .Net Framework, and implemented a Fujitsu-based hardware infrastructure, tapping PRIMEQUEST's partitioning capabilities and PRIMERGY's mirrored memory configurations to deliver reliability and redundancy in support of its produce distribution operations.
Industry: Hospitality

AT&T Services www.att.com
Virtual National Customer Service Center
Project Leads: Mark Cottrell, Executive Director; Richard Noponen, Executive Director; Denise Kelley-Jones, Senior Technical Director
Project Description: The telco created a single, nationwide virtual call center to load balance customer calls to nine physical call centers across the country, threading common IVR, agent desktop, workforce management, and trouble ticket and repair systems into myriad existing regional back-end systems to the tune of $88 million in anticipated savings. [ Readthe full AT&T Services finalist profile | See Top 10 Finalists slideshow ]
Industry: Telecom