Adaptive Application Platforms Provide the Foundation for Strong Business Partnerships

To advance your business with IT, Microsoft provides the infrastructure to help you align business and IT goals, manage complex systems, and optimize your IT investment. The Microsoft Application Platform can help organizations of all sizes take IT from a cost center to a strategic asset, by providing an application platform that helps:

• Manage and implement change. The Microsoft Application Platform is standards-based, interoperable with heterogeneous systems, and integrated to deliver the foundation for adaptive and connected applications.
• Deploy the right resources on the right projects. Integrated IT infrastructure and team development tools help you increase business-process predictability and agility while driving down system costs.
• Turn information into action. Microsoft business applications, such as Microsoft Office and Microsoft Dynamics products, coupled with the Microsoft Application Platform, deliver reliable and cost-effective business intelligence (BI) solutions that help empower people at every level of your business.
• Help ensure reliability, scalability, and security. Customers such as Tesco and Weyerhaeuser depend on the Microsoft application platform and server infrastructure to operate reliably and securely for maximum performance.
• Support real-world business processes. Unlock your business processes from hard-coded, legacy systems, and applications. Microsoft delivers the foundation for business process management through service-oriented architecture (SOA), a software architecture concept that empowers IT to build and deploy real-world solutions that span people, applications, and systems.

The Microsoft Application Platform: Delivering the Foundation for Organizational Agility

Businesses are moving from static e-commerce sites to ones that dynamically deliver self-service capabilities and real-time information. Legacy applications are being replaced with powerful, easy-to-use applications that are integrated into internal Web portals or Microsoft Outlook accounts. There is no single application that companies use to manage all parts of their business. The key is to dynamically link the many systems that run business operations, through service orientation and integrated business process management, to deliver the right information to the right people, at the right time.