In the article, you never mentioned which JDBC driver you were using, nor which options you were setting on the driver's connection string. This can make a big difference in performance.
If you haven't tried it, I would encourage you to test the jTDS driver with your application, with the sendStringParametersAsUnicode property set to 'false'. Hibernate makes it trivial to switch JDBC drivers, if only for testing:
http://jtds.sourceforge.net/faq.html#urlFormat
Note that the jTDS driver still supports connecting to SQL Server 6.5 or 7 databases, unlike Microsoft's latest JDBC driver. (DISCLAIMER: I am a contributor to the project. I implemented the feature that let the driver use named pipes to talk to 6.5 databases that weren't using TCP/IP connections.)
Dave