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Microsoft Arms Partners With New Services Readiness Offerings

Posted on: Monday, 20 April 2009, 08:00 CDT

Services Ready provides participating partners with access to Microsoft tools and best practices, and helps improve customer satisfaction.

REDMOND, Wash., April 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Today, Microsoft Corp. formally announced Services Ready, a program that provides participating Microsoft Gold Certified Partners with access to pre-tested, repeatable offerings and best practices developed by Microsoft Services during early consulting engagements with Microsoft customers. Offerings include pre-sales tools and technical and operational guidance that will help partners accelerate time to market, increase operational efficiencies and improve the quality of their delivery to customers.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000822/MSFTLOGO)

Services Ready provides partners with field-tested engagement tools, templates, guidelines and best practices. These resources scale to the size of engagement and provide a consistent framework to use throughout the sales, delivery and support stages. The net result is a collection of hands-on training tools that help partners reduce the financial investment associated with launching a new service offering.

"Every time we add a new service offering to our portfolio it's like starting a new business: enormous revenue potential, but it requires investment of time and resources to develop the processes, materials and resources to get it right," said Raman Venkatraman, global director, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. "Services Ready eliminates a great deal of that risk because Microsoft has essentially blazed the trail and provided resources to guide our implementation and help us provide greater satisfaction for the customer."

Expanding Partner Opportunity

In a study commissioned by Microsoft, a leading analyst firm estimated the current market opportunity for services on the Microsoft platform to be $383 billion and expects it to grow to more than $490 billion by 2012. Much of this growth will be fueled by businesses looking for ways to improve their performance while also reducing costs. To take advantage of this growth potential, partners constantly need to refresh their offerings as technologies and customer needs evolve. Services Ready is designed to accelerate the learning curve so partners can provide greater expertise and efficiency to their customers.

"In good economic times and bad, customers count on services partners to help them adopt, deploy and maximize the value of their Microsoft investments," said Maria Martinez, corporate vice president, Microsoft Services. "Services Ready goes a long way toward ensuring our customers have a consistent, high-value experience with partners who are armed with Microsoft's own tested and proven tools."

Aligning Microsoft Technology With Customer Needs

Customers benefit from the Services Ready initiative through an improved experience and the reassurance that their services provider is supported by the full strength of tools, best practices and solution offerings developed by Microsoft. Examples include these:

• Identity and security
• Virtualization
• Systems management
• Desktop platform
• Portals and collaboration
• Search
• Unified communications
• Deployment services
• Customer Care Framework

Microsoft Services has pre-tested each offering to help ensure it is sound and ready to be deployed by partners. And to accelerate broader customer adoption, Microsoft has developed training courses and provides technical guidance to support partners throughout qualification, purchase and implementation. With Microsoft Services tools and best practices, partners will have the tools to provide greater productivity and efficiency to their customers.

More Information

To date, more than 100 midmarket and enterprise partners around the world have joined the Services Ready program. Additional information is available at

http://www.microsoft.com/services/microsoftservices/servicesready.mspx.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

SOURCE Microsoft Corp.

Source: PR Newswire

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