REDMOND, Wash., May 24, 2004 — Microsoft Corp. continues to grow its partner ecosystem with the addition of several new members to the Visual Studio® Industry Partner (VSIP) program. Oracle Corp., SAP AG and TIBCO Software Inc. have recently joined the VSIP program, demonstrating their commitment to work with Microsoft’s industry-leading development technologies, including Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the Microsoft®
.NET Framework.
“Microsoft deeply values its partners and the solutions they deliver to our mutual customers,” said Eric Rudder, senior vice president of the Servers and Tools Division at Microsoft. “We are pleased to welcome Oracle, TIBCO and SAP to the VSIP program, where they join existing members such as Borland, Compuware, Intel, IBM, Mercury, webMethods and more than 200 other partners. The growth of this partner ecosystem demonstrates the value of the VSIP program and its ability to provide developers with the tools to deliver applications in a more agile manner.”
“TIBCO and Microsoft share many industry-leading customers who have standardized on our respective technologies. Joining this program will enable us to offer the Microsoft developer community seamless integration between Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET and TIBCO’s leading real-time business integration platform,” said Sanjay Gupta, vice president of global channels and alliances at TIBCO.
Throughout the development life cycle, developers using Visual Studio and the .NET Framework employ a wide range of tools, components and services to complete their projects. The VSIP program is designed for independent software vendors (ISVs), systems integrators (SIs), academic institutions, corporations and developers interested in integrating tools, components and languages into Visual Studio. In addition to offering technology for advanced integration scenarios, the program offers exclusive technical support, co-marketing activities and the ability to redistribute the Visual Studio integrated development environment.
“One of the greatest values of the Visual Studio Industry Partner program is that it helps put Borland’s tools at the fingertips of Microsoft’s extensive developer community,” said Patrick Kerpan, chief technology officer at Borland Software. “Through this relationship, Borland is able to give its customers a seamless environment for building and deploying .NET Framework-based applications.”
Visual Studio 2005 Promises Thriving Ecosystem
At its inception five years ago, the VSIP program consisted of a handful of component vendors. Today, the program is a community of more than 200 partners building approximately 400 products for Visual Studio. It includes industry leaders as well as universities, individuals and small businesses. More than 15,000 developers have joined the VSIP program at the Affiliate level and have downloaded the VSIP Software Development Kit (SDK). More than 30 VSIP partners have announced plans to integrate their solutions into Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0. “Given the tremendous growth of Microsoft’s developer tools and technologies, we are excited about our plans to integrate our business technology optimization products into Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0,” said David Murphy, vice president of Corporate Development at Mercury Corp. “Our plans to integrate Mercury Quality and Performance Centers with Visual Studio 2005 will help ensure that our mutual customers are able to optimize the quality, performance and availability of their business applications.”
More information on the VSIP program and a download of the VSIP SDK can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/extend/ .
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