Virtual Instruments has attained a gold application development competency, demonstrating a “best-in-class” ability and commitment to meet Microsoft Corp. customers’ evolving needs in today’s dynamic business environment and distinguishing itself within the top 1 percent of Microsoft’s partner ecosystem.

To earn a Microsoft gold competency, partners must successfully complete exams (resulting in Microsoft Certified Professionals) to prove their level of technology expertise, and then designate these certified professionals uniquely to one Microsoft competency, ensuring a certain level of staffing capacity. They also must submit customer references that demonstrate successful projects (along with implementing a yearly customer satisfaction study), meet a revenue commitment (for most gold competencies) and pass technology and/or sales assessments.

Through the VirtualWisdom4 IPM platform, Virtual Instruments provides customers with optimal visibility into their end-to-end IT infrastructure. This holistic insight, delivered in the form of real-time analytics, allows customers to identify and mitigate emergent performance problems before they cause larger issues or system outages. VirtualWisdom4 provides the following benefits to customers:

- Comprehensive visibility and definitive insights into the end-to-end IT infrastructure

- Application workload-centric, performance-based service-level agreements (SLAs),

- Interactive and dynamic reporting for real-time trending and analysis, and

- The collective learnings of Virtual Instruments customers through Applied Analytics.

“IT teams no longer have to react to performance degradations and unplanned outages, which will greatly reduce the time spent troubleshooting. Instead, teams can use the VirtualWisdom4 platform to proactively address performance issues, ensuring optimal infrastructure performance,” said John Gentry, vice president of marketing and alliances at Virtual Instruments. “The Microsoft gold application development competency achievement underscores our commitment to our partners’ and customers’ success by providing increased visibility, holistic performance monitoring and context-relevant insights.”

“By achieving a gold competency, partners have demonstrated the highest, most consistent capability and commitment to the latest Microsoft technology,” said Phil Sorgen, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft Corp. “These partners have a deep expertise that puts them in the top 1 percent of our partner ecosystem, and their proficiency will help customers drive innovative solutions on the latest Microsoft technology.”

Earning the Application Development competency helps partners differentiate themselves as a trusted expert to their customers through development and deployment of commercial or custom applications built using core Microsoft technologies like Windows Server and Windows 8 operating systems, the Windows Azure platform, Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 development system, Microsoft BizTalk Server and emerging cloud-based and web business models. By gaining access to a comprehensive set of benefits through the Application Development competency, partners can acquire new customers and help them be more productive and profitable through deployment of business applications, advanced web portals or rich client user interfaces that run on premises or in the cloud. The Microsoft Partner Network helps partners strengthen their capabilities to showcase leadership in the marketplace on the latest technology, to better serve customers and to easily connect with one of the most active, diverse networks in the world.