1 September 2006

TriQuint Semiconductor supplies high-performance modules and components to the world's leading communications companies.

TriQuint ran the majority of its business on the SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) application (version 4.6c), depending on it for financials, materials management, manufacturing, sales and marketing, and other critical functions. For nine years, the company used the Informix database, running under the HP-UX operating system, as its SAP data store.

The need to purchase more SAP licences for the Sawtek division, combined with the new functionality required, caused the IT staff to consider upgrading its SAP software to the latest release, mySAP ERP 2004. However, it didn't make sense to implement a new version of SAP on a database platform with a questionable future. After careful evaluation of both SQL Server 2000 and Oracle 10g, TriQuint awarded the business to Microsoft.

"We were convinced that SQL Server 2000 would provide us with the performance, scalability, and reliability we needed, as well as a steady stream of enhancements," says Ravi Chandran, IT director at TriQuint. "Also, we could not ignore the cost advantages of SQL Server over Oracle."

Microsoft, Dell and SAP worked together to propose a total solution for TriQuint, and the combined hardware and software savings were extremely attractive. "SQL Server 2000 licences from SAP were significantly less expensive than the Oracle licences, and Dell hardware was an order of magnitude less expensive than HP UNIX servers, and even less expensive than the HP ProLiant servers we were considering," Chandran says.

Once the hardware infrastructure was in place and the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system was installed on all servers, the TriQuint IT staff spent one long weekend migrating the old SAP implementation from Informix to SQL Server 2000. The following day, the team upgraded SAP to the new mySAP ERP 2004. The time required both to migrate SAP R/3 to SQL Server 2000 and to upgrade to the newer version of SAP was just three days.

"Migrating SAP to a new database is a major undertaking, but the effort went smoothly," Chandran says. "We received excellent support from SAP, Microsoft and Dell working together as a team."

By migrating its SAP application to SQL Server 2000, running under Windows Server 2003 on Dell PowerEdge servers, TriQuint has improved its database performance and dramatically reduced its IT infrastructure costs. The company is also enjoying excellent database reliability.

TriQuint will be enjoying maintenance savings, too, with Dell's standard three-year maintenance contract, which is more cost-effective to extend than HP-UX maintenance contracts.

"Since moving SAP to SQL Server 2000, we've seen our dialogue response performance double," says Dave Folts, manager of systems support for TriQuint. "Dialogue response time is an SAP measure of overall system performance. Our users are experiencing double the responsiveness and two to three times better query times."

One-second response times have dropped to a half-second, and half-second response times have dropped to a quarter-second. "These numbers sound small, but they are how users evaluate the experience of using SAP," Chandran says. "Going from a second to a half-second is a palpable productivity gain in desktop computing."