Fast. Scalable. Flexible. Powerful. Reliable. Enterprise-ready.
- Five Nines: Windows 2000 Servers Deliver Near-Perfect Reliability for Businesses.
- Home Shopping Network's mixed operating environment couldn't meet the speed, performance and functionality the company's fast-growing e-business site demanded. Solution? By standardizing on Microsoft and Intel technology, HSN can innovate and react to changes in the market. And they did it in just 45 days.
- Snack-food giant Nabisco found that product development costs were gobbling up profits. Solution? A new collaboration system built on Microsoft software is saving the company millions of dollars.
- Ford Motor Co. needed an online marketing strategy that gave the automaker control over its dealers' micro sites, yet still offered the dealers a high degree of flexibility and functionality. In just 12 weeks, 95 percent of all Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, and Volvo dealers, representing over 99 percent of all the company's sales, were up and running on the DealerConnection platform by Microsoft partner SoftAd-100 percent engineered with Microsoft tools and technology.
- Starbucks, FreeMarkets, and MortgageRamp, an affiliate of GMAC Commercial Mortgage, use systems based on Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server, and get 99.999 percent server uptime.
Business agility. It's what all these companies got from Microsoft software and partners.
Getting to market faster. Lowering costs by transforming legacy systems with new capabilities. Taking advantage of the widest array of familiar technology tools and products, as well as solutions from world-class Microsoft partners and developers.
In business today, speed-faster time to decision, faster response to customers, faster time to profits-is everything.
Microsoft's Strategy
Microsoft technology supports the business need to compete in a global economy defined by rapid change. The ability to adapt on an ongoing basis is crucial. Microsoft's strategy is to provide enterprise-ready technologies, products, and services that let companies respond to change quickly, making responsiveness a competitive advantage.
The knowledge workers whose skills are the core asset of businesses the world over already know the Microsoft Office suite of desktop productivity and messaging products, and how they are powered by the familiar, reliable Windows family of operating systems. Knowledge workers, in turn, rely on the expertise of the millions of corporate IT professionals and developers who use Microsoft Server products and the Microsoft Visual Studio® family of developer tools.
Because these tools-familiar worldwide-come from Microsoft, they work together seamlessly, and will continue to interoperate as your business grows in scale, and your software demands grow with it.
Next Stop: .NET
Microsoft's Web solution platform provides a scalable architecture for distributed, enterprise-quality Web applications-a platform used by more than 40 percent of all secure, transacted Web sites and almost 60 percent of the Goldman-Sachs list of top B2B Exchanges. Microsoft has also delivered enhanced Web services-based on open standards-which developers can incorporate into their software solutions, thus speeding development. Instead of having to install dozens of software components on every PC, your employees will instantly call up programs as needed demand from the Web, saving corporate IT time and development expense.
This successful programming model is the basis for Microsoft.NET, a vision for the Internet in which software is delivered as a service, accessible by any device, any time, any place, and is fully programmable and personalizeable.
Why Microsoft?
Microsoft and its partners provide the comprehensive set of tools, products, services, and solutions businesses need to succeed in markets that can change overnight. For example, the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Server applications are built on open Internet standards and protocols, with tools and services that integrate computing and communications in new ways. The new servers have been designed explicitly to enable the rapid development, integration, and orchestration of any group of Web services and applications into a single solution.
Accelerating development time is one way Microsoft technologies let businesses adapt quickly and seize new opportunities. Microsoft's new computing model also heralds new levels of operational efficiencies and ease of management, reducing both time and cost to deploy solutions.
Microsoft's worldwide network of partners-independent software vendors, Web service providers, and experts who build applications and design solutions for businesses with Microsoft technology-gives companies choosing Microsoft technology access to:
- More than 10,000 applications for mission-critical business operations such as e-commerce, Customer Relationship Management, database, and more.
- Industry leaders such as Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola Computer Group, Unisys, and Stratus, who can build solutions so reliable that downtime equates to less than five minutes per year.
- Over 900,000 Microsoft Certified Professionals worldwide who can help you turn business needs into deployed solutions.
- More than six million developers worldwide who use Microsoft development tools to build e-business solutions.
Next Steps
Microsoft technology can solve your mission-critical business needs, reduce total cost of ownership, and speed your time to market:
