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New Microsoft Premier Support Offering Provides Mission-Critical IT Support


WEBWIRE

Premier Mission Critical Support expedites incident resolution and mitigates the impact of system disruptions.

REDMOND, Wash. — Furthering its commitment to evolve its enterprise support offerings to align with customer needs, Microsoft Corp. today announced the worldwide availability of Premier Mission Critical Support, a new Microsoft Services Premier Support add-on. Premier Mission Critical Support provides enhanced support for mission-critical solutions through guaranteed response times backed by financial credits, round-the-clock access to expertise and prioritized access to product development teams.

The new service is part of Microsoft’s family of Premier Support offerings. Premier Mission Critical Support delivers personalized support coverage through designated support professionals who understand a customer’s unique solution configuration and deployment environment, facilitating faster response time and more effective problem resolution. Customers will have access to round-the-clock support coverage for high-severity incidents through a dedicated phone line and will always engage with a select team of experienced Microsoft support engineers.

“Customers told us they wanted Microsoft to help ensure that their mission-critical applications remain available and to help get their solutions up and running as fast as possible should they go down,” said Bryan Belmont, general manager, Support and Health for Microsoft Services. “Premier Mission Critical Support is evidence of our longstanding commitment to meeting our customers’ needs.”

In addition, Premier Mission Critical Support issues receive expedited access to the product development teams. This includes end-to-end incident management and ensures the fastest possible root cause identification. Support works with product teams to provide critical, on-demand patch production in severe situations.

Research1 from Gartner shows that, since 2005, unplanned downtime for mission-critical applications has increased by more than 50 percent in organizations with fewer than 2,500 users and almost 70 percent for organizations with more than 2,500 users. By pairing personalized support processes with expedited response times, Premier Mission Critical Support helps business owners achieve optimal use of their technology investments, minimize system downtime and maintain a fully functional IT infrastructure operating at optimal efficiency.

“Customers are grappling with increasing quantities of data, much of it essential to their bottom line,” said John Madden, research director at Ovum Summit, a leading global consulting and advisory firm. “This add-on complements Microsoft’s portfolio of support offerings, provides a simplified process, demonstrates a commitment to responsiveness and provides dedicated technical resources familiar with customers’ environments.”

Premier Mission Critical Support currently covers Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 and Service Pack 3, and SQL Server 2008 components of a mission-critical solution.

“More customers than ever before are entrusting their mission-critical applications to SQL Server 2008,” said Dan Neault, general manager, SQL Server product marketing at Microsoft. “With Premier Mission Critical, customers receive our highest level of enhanced support and direct expertise from the SQL Server product team to quickly respond to immediate customer issues, minimize costly downtime and prevent future occurrences.”

More information about Premier Mission Critical Support is available at http://www.microsoft.com/services/microsoftservices/srv_premier_mcs.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.

1 Gartner, Dataquest Insight: Unplanned Downtime Rising for Mission-Critical Applications, Ron Silliman, Oct. 3, 2008, Document ID G00161629

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