Having been in the business since the 1860s, Australia's QR Limited knows how to run a railroad. As the company prepared to upgrade its SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) software it decided to move its SAP applications and databases from a mainframe and DB2 environment to the Microsoft® Application Platform, including Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 database software running on a geocluster supported by the Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. The company estimates it is saving about U.S.$100,000 per month in mainframe costs, since moving its SAP infrastructure to a cluster of commodity servers running the Microsoft Application Platform. QR Limited reports 20 to 40 percent faster SAP transactional response times and up to 8 times faster batch processing since moving SAP to SQL Server 2005.