More businesses choose the Microsoft Application Platform as the foundation of their business applications than any other technology vendor. By choosing the Microsoft Application Platform, your business can get more value from the applications it runs today, and more rapidly create new applications that meet your changing business needs.
People-Focused Solutions
People are the critical link in any IT system. Ensuring that your tools and applications meet their unique needs with minimal additional training is critical to gaining user adoption and IT return-on-investment. Microsoft’s heritage is built on developing productive tools for business users, developers and IT administrators – ensuring that all of your people can be productive, connect with colleagues to collaborate, and drive impact.
The workforce today is constantly connected across the PC, phone, and browser. By utilizing the Microsoft Application Platform, your people have access to the information, processes and colleagues they need to connect with, anytime and anywhere.
Rapid Time to Value
Your IT department can more rapidly connect existing applications, as well as build and customize new solutions. By providing highly functional building blocks for Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and efficiently managing the development and application lifecycle process, you can realize faster time to value for your business applications.
The Microsoft Application Platform features a tightly integrated development environment that gives your development teams productive tools and a powerful choice of deployment options, including Microsoft Windows, the Microsoft Office system, the Web, and mobile devices.
Your entire IT department can now be more efficient. By providing role-based tools across the development and IT management lifecycle, you can manage the application delivery process end-to-end through Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Microsoft System Center and Microsoft SQL Server.
Mission Critical Operations
A core part of any IT department’s mission is to ensure continual availability and performance of systems that support core business functions. Microsoft has invested in building a set of technologies and products that are ready to support your application and data requirements alongside the industry’s leading hardware, services, and application providers.
Customers from across the globe and every industry are adopting the Microsoft Application Platform to support their mission critical applications. Premier Bankcard, one of the largest credit providers in the United States, runs its 17-terabyte mission critical Business Intelligence solution on Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008. Lockheed Martin saw a 41% reduction in hardware, software, and maintenance costs in migrating their SAP infrastructure from UNIX to Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server. View more Mission Critical case studies.
Performance gains have been proven through TPC-E benchmark testing with five hardware partners (Dell, HP, NEC, IBM, and Unisys), where the top four performance results and the top price/performance results are all held by SQL Server. According to Noel Yuhanna of Forrester Research, for the majority of mission-critical applications today, SQL Server 2008 already has the strongest combination of price/performance, manageability, security, and DBA productivity.
Data Center to Cloud
With the cloud growing in importance to IT departments around the world, Microsoft has invested in a complete cloud computing platform that provides you with the advantages of having your data and applications in the cloud.
The cloud will be an important component of enterprise IT – and many customers are looking to create secure and flexible hybrid applications that span from on-premise resources to the cloud. Microsoft offers a complete and consistent platform where applications are built and operated using tools and methodologies to enable greater flexibility and a seamless onramp to the cloud.
The Microsoft Azure Platform enables rapid provisioning and deployment of cloud-based solutions. You can now deploy applications to the cloud without needing to acquire hardware, or manage aspects such as high availability through replication, fault tolerance and patch management. Microsoft is committed to supporting customers across on-premises, hosted and cloud scenarios by driving technology innovation that enables choice, flexibility and value for all customers.
Maximizing Value, Driving Down Costs
Globally, IT departments have navigated through the new economy by driving down costs. The need to streamline systems and operations has meant that many IT departments have standardized platforms and disparate toolsets. Microsoft is focused on helping customers streamline and standardize to achieve cost savings, while offering choice and flexibility in third-party solutions.
Microsoft has the most complete platform approach in the industry – built to run well together and interoperate with other leading solutions in the market. By having a complete and integrated approach, customers are able to drive efficiencies and value. The Microsoft Application Platform can also scale to virtually all customer requirements at industry-leading price/performance rates.
Microsoft has the most extensive partner network in the industry. By partnering with thousands of the world’s leading hardware, software, and services providers, customers are able to select the right solution based on IT and business need.
