Microsoft Corp. Sunday (Jan 21) launched a major business positioning initiative that underscores the unique benefits that Microsoft software delivers today and will deliver to an even greater degree with the Microsoft .NET platform — to meet the rapidly changing requirements of large enterprise customers.
Built around the theme of Software for the Agile Business, the company’s new marketing effort spotlights how Microsoft software provides businesses with the agility to turn the accelerating pace of change into a competitive advantage.
As part of the new strategy, Microsoft is launching a $200 million U.S. advertising campaign that showcases how Microsoft software provides businesses with enterprise-level quality and reliability, unprecedented speed and flexibility, and the empowerment solutions they require to compete and succeed in today’s digital economy.
The launch of Microsoft’s agility campaign focuses attention on the increasing competition between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems Inc., Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp. in the enterprise software segment, which Microsoft estimates is approximately $90 billion annually.
“Businesses today need to be fast and nimble to compete and respond to customer needs, yet a lot of the technology for business is big, slow and expensive,” said Steve Ballmer, president and CEO of Microsoft. “We believe Microsoft offers a better and far more cost-effective solution. Over the past 10 years, we have listened to customers and focused like a laser beam on building enterprise software that gives businesses the agility they need to compete in today’s marketplace. The ad campaign we are launching today is designed to show enterprise customers why they should take a good look at our solutions.”
With the launch of the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system and the line of Microsoft .NET enterprise servers, Microsoft’s enterprise products not only match competitors’ in breadth and depth, but go far beyond by providing solutions that enable customers to adapt quickly and flexibly to fast-changing business conditions and customer needs. Agility is also a core benefit of Microsoft’s .NET strategy, which is focused on delivering the technologies for the next-generation Internet.
“Microsoft has an amazing growth opportunity in the enterprise,” said Mich Mathews, vice president of marketing at Microsoft. “The challenge now is to make sure all our customers know that we have solutions that are superior and offer greater value. That’s the principal goal of this marketing effort.”
The Home Shopping Network (HSN) is one of many customers Microsoft is working closely with to develop and deploy cutting-edge technology solutions. With more than 750,000 hits per day on its website, HSN needed an IT infrastructure that would enable it to respond quickly to marketplace demands and solve performance and availability problems easily. By migrating from an Oracle and Sun solution and standardizing on a Microsoft and Intel solution, HSN reduced costs, increased performance, simplified vendor management and decreased time-to-market for new functionality.
“Using software solutions from Microsoft has significantly enhanced our ability to build improvements into our operations and remain ahead of our competition,” said Scott Mitchell, chief technology officer at Home Shopping Network Interactive. “The combination of Microsoft’s integrated products and services also enabled us to capitalize on software we already had, which resulted in significant cost savings. Microsoft technology also helped us move quickly. We rebuilt our entire website from the ground up in less than 45 days.”
