eBid offers its customers a hosted, scalable, customized, secure, and rapidly deployed procurement system with a 99.9-percent system availability guarantee. To do that, eBid relies on the services of Rackspace, a San Antonio, Texas–based company that provides enterprise-level Web infrastructure and managed services to businesses of all sizes. Serving more than 10,000 customers through its six data centers worldwide, Rackspace integrates the industry’s best technologies to meet each customer’s needs, and it backs up its tools and services with a commitment that it calls Fanatical Support™.

Among the tools of the marketing trade, e-mail offers the greatest potential to reach customers directly. But doing it right, reaching the right customers with the right message while maintaining compliance with privacy standards, is not an easy task. Enter ExactTarget and its hosted Agency, Retail/DM, and Enterprise direct marketing solutions built on the Microsoft platform. By leveraging data to develop timely, relevant communications with all of the marketer's constituents—from existing customers and new prospects to partners, investors, and employees—ExactTarget’s solutions are just as useful for the local hardware store as they are for the world’s largest corporations.

Loyalty Lab’s Customer Relationship Manager Suite provides retailers and service companies with an integrated suite of hosted, on-demand applications for managing and creating loyalty programs and promotional offers from a single desktop. The company helps its clients integrate customer and sales information from online, retail, and catalog channels to create loyalty programs that drive retail store customers to Web sites and vice versa. Loyalty Labs built its service on the Microsoft platform because it provides a comprehensive and integrated set of technologies that are reliable and scalable, but at the same time affordable and easy to use.

Since its launch in 2003, the social networking site MySpace has become a cultural phenomenon. The site is a premier destination for everyone from small groups of friends getting together for a virtual chitchat, to serious filmmakers and musicians who use the site to forge closer connections with their fans. The Microsoft platform, applications, and development environment have been the foundation of MySpace’s infrastructure since day one. “The Microsoft platform, and especially the Atlas framework and the capabilities of Windows Vista, are helping us create innovative new features that empower our members’ creativity and give MySpace a ‘stickiness’ that Web sites alone can’t match.” — MySpace Chief Technology Officer

There’s no question that the quality and training of frontline contact center agents are crucial elements of successful customer service. Equally important in today’s highly competitive marketplace is the technology infrastructure that businesses need to enable and support their customer contact system. Since its inception in 1999, Echopass has used the Microsoft platform and applications as a foundation for its hosted call and contact center on-demand solutions. Echopass runs its secure data center on Windows Server, SQL Server, and Exchange Server, with Microsoft Terminal Services providing applications remotely to client machines.