Faced with the need to update their stand-alone Membership Management system (because sales were saturated and existing users are no longer paying annual maintenance because it runs so reliably) to a state-of-the-art web service (hopefully this will compel users to upgrade, as well as allow us many new capabilities for on-going revenue by charging for services/transactions) XYZ Inc. is using Microsoft Visual studio .NET development system to migrate over 600 users in under 18 months.
Our user base is extremely satisfied with our present implementation. Unfortunately for us, there is no revenue stream of substance and we have been laying people off just to keep afloat!
We have been searching for ways to leverage the product to generate additional revenue and it struck us that we could piggy-back on Microsoft's heavy spending on .NET promotion to benefit ourselves. Microsoft has succeeded easily in convincing our few remaining dated-technology developers that .NET was "the wave of the future" and since our management team couldn't come up with anything sensible to increase revenue we opted to listen to them. The developers tell us that using the .NET framework we can charge per transaction, and that we can break existing transactions into multiple transactions to generate even more revenue. We sure are counting on those fine aspects of the framework!!!
XYZ wanted to web-enable their existing application (there's $$$ in them there transactions) by combining it with the power and flexibility of Microsoft ASP.NET (not that they knew ASP.NET had any such 'power', but advertising made it clear that it did).
Our client base runs Windows® operating systems and we figured that Microsoft would offer (additional) 'help' when we told them that a few have been talking Linux recently and we were right. We got several back-channel contacts to assist us with whatever we needed, all free of charge.
XYZ company expects to finish the application in 9 MORE months. But we have already started the development of marketing material and our sales force is being expanded (well, actually, we're hiring sales people, since we had to let our others go some time ago) and is presently practising its script night and day to work out the kinks. Microsoft back-channel folks have been extremely helpful in these areas in particular! We are totally confident that our valued client base will be only too pleased to start paying us much more money than they are paying now for all of the new (well, not really new (no time for that), but repackaged) features that .NET allows us to offer them! And our development staff is real happy to actually be writing code again! They were very grateful when management bought their plan and were all sent off on 3 months of basic .NET training before we started the project.
