Microsoft in the Enterprise

Running a large organization is challenging and complex. With the world economy in flux and the global marketplace more competitive, every organization needs to get the greatest return on its IT investments. At Microsoft, we are focused on helping you use technology to achieve the most business value throughout your organization.

We know that one of the keys to success in this globally competitive, rapidly changing business world is to ensure that your people have the capabilities, tools, information, and solutions they need to make the biggest contribution they can, as quickly as they can.

At Microsoft, we focus on enabling the people-ready business. Microsoft offers organizations an integrated platform spanning clients, servers, and services that people can use in a broad range of workplace scenarios.

The front-end applications are people-ready: familiar, flexible, and role-tailored. The back-end infrastructure is enterprise-ready: highly secure, manageable, flexible, and interoperable-offering organizations the agility they need to drive success. Microsoft is focused on helping enterprises harness the talent of their people to drive successful business outcomes. But we recognize that a key customer challenge is often organizational misalignment across people, processes, and technology. To resolve this disconnect, we respond with an integrated approach that combines Role-Based Productivity-featuring solutions that move beyond personal productivity and business process automation to adapt to how people work-with a Dynamic IT strategy that reduces the complexity and cost of IT management while helping to protect information, control access, and achieve agility.

Our broad range of people-ready software and technologies can lower costs, improve productivity, and enable your people to innovate for growth and sustainable strategic advantage.

Lower Costs

It's on everyone's mind. How can I lower costs and still remain competitive? In fact, you can reduce costs across your organization by optimizing your IT infrastructure and become even more agile than before. With Microsoft solutions, you reduce your costs of training, software purchase, and energy consumption and enable more efficient management of software applications. These are real savings that go straight to the bottom line. With Microsoft solutions you can:

  • Reduce your total cost of ownership using online services.

  • Reduce your hardware and energy costs through virtualization.

  • Realize a significant cost reduction in server ownership by improving the management of your data-center operations.

  • Lower your infrastructure and platform costs through optimization.

  • Reduce your travel and communications costs with Unified Communications.

Improve Productivity

Realizing the business value of IT requires more than just lowering your costs. When deployed as a strategic asset, IT makes your organization more competitive by streamlining your operations. Our solutions help you improve organizational performance, introduce operational efficiencies, and better manage your risk. You can:

  • Deliver flexibility to your people and greater efficiency and agility to your IT organization by implementing application, PC, and server virtualization.

  • Make your virtual meetings face-to-face interactions with new video conferencing and collaboration tools.

  • Make the most of your organization's information with Business Intelligence solutions that give your people the right information at the right time in an easy-to-use format. By tracking and analyzing data across your organization, you drive better insights, make better decisions, and plan more effectively.

Enable Growth

Prospering in today's marketplace requires top-line growth as well as bottom-line savings to maintain strategic advantage. It's wise to focus on controlling expenses, but history has shown that organizations that pursue innovation can take advantage of market changes and new opportunities. At Microsoft, we believe that people provide the inspiration and initiative to find new customers, implement new ideas, and expand into new markets. With Microsoft, you can:

  • Use new communications methods to give your people the tools they need to collaborate from virtually anywhere in the world, allowing you to break down silos that impede innovation. Because our Unified Communications solutions work with your existing tools, you can ensure that collaboration is part of everyday business.

  • Support everyone in your organization, information workers, business leaders, IT professionals, and developers, with Business Intelligence solutions that help them make strategic decisions about innovations that are inspired and informed by insightful business data.

The Microsoft Difference

We know that you have many choices for IT. But at Microsoft, we strive to give you the greatest value for your IT investment by delivering these competitive advantages:

Familiarity

No technology investment will be effective if people don't use it. We design technologies to reflect the way people and organizations work. Because we span the digital lifestyle and the digital work style, our tools are familiar and easy to use. This results in fewer training barriers, wider use and adoption, and ultimately a higher return on your investment.

Choice

Business needs can change overnight. Technology should be agile enough to respond. We offer you the greatest range of choices in the use and deployment of software. Our Software-plus-Services vision means that you can deploy from the cloud or the enterprise data center and deliver rich applications to PCs, the Web, and mobile devices. And with our commitment to setting new standards in interoperability, our solutions integrate with your heterogeneous computing environment. Choice means giving you the flexibility required to create the IT infrastructure that is right for you as you balance cost considerations with business imperatives.

Innovation

Microsoft has always believed in, and fostered, an innovation culture. We know that innovation fuels the development of groundbreaking and customer-centric technologies, and we are firmly committed to the process of continuous innovation. Innovations are fueled by systematic internal processes, market feedback, acquisitions, and a broad research and development portfolio. At Microsoft, we spend more on research and development than any other software company, ensuring that you have ongoing access to the most innovative solutions. In fiscal year 2009, Microsoft plans to invest upward of U.S. $8 billion in research and development.

Relationships

Getting the most from IT depends as much on great relationships as it does on great software. Microsoft is committed to creating long-term relationships with our enterprise customers, and we are continually working on ways to make doing business with us easier. A broad network of leading independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators, supported by Microsoft Services, is available to our customers worldwide. Microsoft Services offers services from architecture, planning, and technology consulting to enterprise support to help your business achieve rapid and tangible value from your Microsoft technology investments. And our global ISV and system integrator network offers specialized experience in all industries, with experts who are trained and certified to help you implement and deploy your Microsoft IT solutions.