Software is our era’s driving force of innovation.  It is constantly changing how we live and work, and businesses everywhere are adapting to mobile, connected, and global economies.  Cloud innovations that open new markets and optimize resources are creating competitive advantages on a daily basis – and these advantages are capitalized upon by a modern workforce that is challenging traditional IT with a breadth of consumer products that blur information boundaries.  Now people are more connected than ever through laptops, tablets, phones, TVs, watches, activity trackers, and more.  Technology is a vast and infinite landscape shaped by developers who create innovative solutions that both differentiate and inspire.

Although software can capture opportunity and help a business stand out, it is also at the front and center of risk.  On any given day, there are headlines detailing the compromise of customer data or a high profile system outage.  Usually, the software at fault was never designed to scale or it was inadequately tested, but other times the problem was rooted in core deficiencies, like a lack of secure development practices.  Good software creates opportunity.  Bad software removes it.

Building the future isn’t easy.  Good software must be usable, secure, supportable, compliant, scalable, and flexible enough to work across different form factors and platforms.  The developers building this software must be proficient with an ALM approach that consistently drives projects forward and enforces a high bar for quality with teams that are often highly distributed.  These developers are expected to retain expertise across tools and development stacks that constantly change.  At every stage testing investments are scrutinized, modernization is delayed, and each year the comprehensive skills any developer requires to stay competitive are harder to maintain.  Few teams have the collective experience to fill all the gaps, and, all too often, the new “resident expert” is born out of late night research and the high pressure to deliver a product.

There is a better way. 

What if someone at Microsoft was focused on helping your developers meet your organization’s business goals?  Imagine working with Microsoft on your next project to ramp up teams on new technologies, proven practices, dev tools, and more.  What if you could pull in the experience of Microsoft for UI design, performance testing, ALM excellence, and secure development lifecycle to work with your teams?  What if Microsoft helped take the guesswork out of support lifecycle planning and roadmap awareness?  What if you could easily pull in distinguished consultants for strategic guidance on products and technologies to fill in knowledge gaps and remove blockers?  What would it mean to have Microsoft available 24×7 if you ever had a critical business outage?  How could a managed support relationship, an extensive technical network, and the collective experience of Microsoft improve the way you build and innovate with software?

What if all of this were already possible?

Premier Support for Developers has been one of the best kept secrets in the Microsoft Premier Services family for nearly 20 years, and thousands of companies all over the world already know one important fact:  Whether you are a giant in the industry or a pioneering startup, we provide a comprehensive support relationship to help customers build better software.

If you are a business leader, this blog will provide the insight and the next steps to challenge how you think about the ROI of software quality across your teams.  If you are developer, this blog will empower you to consider how much the quality of your work can impact your business.  Technology and business cannot ignore each other.  They thrive together.

We created this blog to share how we work with businesses and why it is so important to properly support and invest in development teams.  We’ll regularly share the most compelling stories about how organizations have set themselves apart by working with Premier Developer, and we’ll spotlight some of our very unique people and services.

If you are interested in learning more about what we can do for you, let’s talk.