As above plus additional features/functionality and enhanced licening options: You should be using Enterprise Edition if you have:
- Consolidation or Virtualisation projects
- High availability needs
- Stringent compliance requirements
- High scale Data Warehousing, BI or reporting requirements
- High performance needs

Proof Points:

Consolidation & virtualisation is enabled through:
- Support for unlimited virtualisation
- Runs on a greater number of procs (the machine maximum vs 4 procs with Standard ed)
- Runs a greater number of instances (50 vs 16 with Standard ed)
- Includes “Resource Governer”, critical for shared environments.
- Backup compression, reducing storage requirements by up to 80%

High Availability is enhanced through:
- 16 node clustering (vs 2 with Standard ed)
- Support for hot add memory & CPU
- "Database Snapshot" feature enables faster recovery times

Features supporting Audit & Compliance include:
- Transparent data encryption, allowing legacy applications to benefit from encrypted databases.
- 3rd party key support, allowing the organisation to manage encryption keys consistently.
- Auditing & reporting on all database actions & access

BI & reporting improvements come from:
- Proactive caching of commonly used data for faster queries
- Distributed architecture for cubes allows greater scale & parallel processing
- Distributed report generation to take the reporting load from the transaction server
- Infinite click through in ad hoc reports

Performance advantages come from:
- I64 (Itanium) support
- A variety of features that allow parallel queries & processing

• Aviation Technology Group - Aviation Company Uses PLM Suite to Improve Collaboration and Internal Operations "By utilizing the Microsoft SQL Server version of UGS Teamcenter, we actually saved approximately $20,000 in hardware and software costs during our initial implementation. We also reduced our total cost of ownership by minimizing the amount of IT training and staff that we need to support multiple database platforms," Chris Ray, IT Director at ATG, explains, adding: "The cost of the solution was much less than some of the competitors and the tools allowed us to quickly adapt to the system and be able to support it in production. The enhanced functionality and features available in Microsoft products allowed us to do more with less, which is important to a company like ours."
• Ste. Michelle Wine Estates - Vintner Gains Faster Access to Business Data for More Profitable Decision Making Ste. Michelle put the Microsoft Business Intelligence solution into production for just half the cost of most of the alternatives that it considered, representing a savings of U.S.$100,000 in the first year, according to Joe Gregg, IT Director for Ste. Michelle Wine Estates. He attributes the savings to several factors. "The Microsoft Business Intelligence solution was a natural extension to our Microsoft-based environment, so integration was easy and we were able to take advantage of much of the software—such as SQL Server and Visio—that we already had," says Gregg. "We didn’t have to throw out our existing database components, as we would have had to do with an Oracle-based solution. And while some solutions looked cost-effective for initial deployment, they would have become much more expensive as we scaled to support more users. The Microsoft solution will remain price competitive even as we add dashboards and users across the country."

The full Microsoft Application Platform including BizTalk Server and Visual Studio. This set of technologies integrate seamlessly to offer a mission-critical integration, development and data platform for all applications across the organisation

If you buy software 'off the shelf', known as Full Packaged Product (FPP), this is oriented to retail purchases for consumers or small business's.

Any business looking to purchase more than five licences should consider a Volume Licensing agreement. Please contact our software/licence team to receive a quotation today! SQL Server 2008 licences are available as 'per processor' or on the Server + CAL model.