REDMOND, Wash., December 14, 1998 — Enterprise customers will have one more reason to celebrate this holiday season – Microsoft is bringing yet another world-class source of technology and business consulting their way.
Cambridge Technology Partners and Microsoft are expanding their relationship to form a strategic alliance that will focus on delivering end-to-end, mission-critical solutions based upon Microsoft technology. The combination of reliable enterprise technology from Microsoft and reliable implementation by Cambridge will set a new standard in the industry for delivering leading-edge business solutions at fixed costs under short deadlines. In today’s competition-driven business environment, companies depend on line-of-business applications to achieve and maintain a competitive edge. Yet deploying these applications often turns into runaway projects with significant time and cost overruns. When these overruns occur, companies lose much of the strategic value they hoped to gain from the new application.
Through the alliance, the two companies will provide innovative, reliable solutions in five key areas:
New Business Ecosystems/Electronic Commerce: New Business Ecosystems will enable companies to redefine their relationships with customers, suppliers and employees by enabling companies to develop sophisticated networks with their business partners using Microsoft Site Server Commerce Edition.
Customer Loyalty: Customer loyalty initiatives such as customer management and sales force automation are aimed at improving identification, segmentation and understanding of a company’s customer base, which leads to improved customer service.
Data Warehousing: Microsoft/Cambridge data warehousing solutions will include the design, development, deployment and management of data warehouses and data marts based on Microsoft SQL Server.
COM+ Rapid Application Deployment (RAD): Cambridge and Microsoft will work together to combine custom application development based on COM+ with Cambridge’s unique Rapid Application Deployment (RAD) methodology and the Microsoft Visual Studio Development system.
Investment Trading Platforms – Cambridge and Microsoft will work together to design, develop and deploy portfolio management and securities trading applications based on the Microsoft Windows Distributed interNet Applications architecture for Financial Services (Windows DNAfs).
To meet the demand for solutions in these areas, Cambridge will build an organization of 1,000 Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers (MCSE) and Microsoft Certified Solution Developers (MCSD). The company will also develop and demonstrate innovative Microsoft solutions at most of its 53 offices worldwide. Moreover, Cambridge will standardize internally on Microsoft’s enterprise solutions platform — including Windows NT, BackOffice, Office and Exchange — on more than 4,300 desktops worldwide.
Several years ago, Cambridge pioneered a new model for delivering cutting-edge solutions on a guaranteed fixed-price, fixed-time basis, which reduces the risk the client assumes when tackling strategic technology initiatives. Lower costs, faster implementation and lower risk are tremendous benefits for enterprise customers who want to take advantage of distributed computing solutions based upon Microsoft’s enterprise platform.
Cambridge also specializes in developing replicable solutions and has earned a reputation for meeting delivery expectations more than 94 percent of the time. The combination of reliable enterprise technology from Microsoft and reliable implementation by Cambridge will provide compelling solutions and will enable enterprise customers to realize more quickly the business value of these solutions.
