Microsoft Arms Partners With New Services Readiness Offerings

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.

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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.

Andrea Platt Dyal, +1-503-443-7000, adyal@waggeneredstrom.com, or Rapid
Response Team, +1-503-443-7070, rrt@waggeneredstrom.com, both of Waggener
Edstrom Worldwide, for Microsoft Corp.