14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has been labeled as one of the leaders among the companies providing application infrastructure, according to market analysis firm Gartner. The Redmond company applauded its positioning in the Leaders quadrant of four Gartner Magic Quadrants: the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Back-End Application Integration Projects, the Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for SOA Composite Application Projects, the Magic Quadrant for New Systematic Service-Oriented Business Application Projects, and the Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems.
“We believe that these reports validate the depth of our offering in these spaces. In our opinion, Microsoft’s position in these Magic Quadrants shows that we are delivering a leading-edge platform for service orientation and integration. We think the results and customer adoption speak for themselves,” Steven Martin, senior director of Developer Platform Product Management at Microsoft, revealed.
The Microsoft Application Platform, an integral part of the company's Dynamic IT vision, is designed to provide a structured, product-agnostic IT maturity framework. In this sense, Microsoft is offering a set of integrated platform solutions in conjunction with development tools, which ultimately enable business customers to boost productivity and the delivery pace of new applications at a reduced Total Cost of Ownership.
“Customers are leveraging the strong technical performance and low cost of ownership of the Microsoft Application Platform, and are seeing immediate business results. Factor in the flexibility and choice we are now offering with our software-plus-services strategy, and we are providing a truly differentiated set of solutions,” Martin added.
Via the Microsoft Application Platform, the company is essentially offering the Microsoft .NET Framework, SQL Server 2008, BizTalk Server, Visual Studio, Microsoft Expression, Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Windows Server 2008. At the same time, the software giant is promising that there is more to come to its Application Platform, pointing to the upcoming Azure Services Platform and “Oslo.”
“Leaders are vendors with a proven and comprehensive integrated product set, as well as a sizeable installed base of reasonably satisfied clients that extends internationally. They have an ample installed base of products to cross-sell their integration solutions to, and have demonstrated their ability to anticipate technology and market trends over the years by extending their offerings with composite, application-enabling technology,” Gartner stated.