SAP AG announced that Microsoft Corporation supports the SAP® BusinessObjects(TM) Planning and Consolidation application, version for the Microsoft platform, as a preferred solution for customers running their business applications on the Microsoft platform. The companies are currently identifying potential targeted go-to-market initiatives to accelerate the adoption of SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation among the Microsoft user base, as well as the SAP® BusinessObjects(TM) Edge Planning and Consolidation application among small to midsize organizations. The companies are also planning to collaborate to further optimize these solutions for the Microsoft platform to deliver superior performance for customers at a lower cost of ownership. The companies aim to help customers tap the business value of a best-in-class application to perform efficient and effective planning, budgeting and forecasting and deliver a faster, more compliant financial close.

3M Co. announced the launch of its new Visual Attention Service (VAS), using the Windows Azure platform from Microsoft Corporation. The new Web-based service from 3M makes it possible for designers to test the effectiveness of their content using visual attention models which are based on algorithms that predict where a viewer's attention will go in a scene. Photos, creative content, packaging concepts and all manner of creative media can be evaluated in different scenes or contexts. Users simply upload images to VAS from their web browsers. Then application's processing engine evaluates the image for its 'visual saliency' and returns a map of the image that indicates, using markings such as those seen on a heat map, which areas of the images are most likely to attract viewer attention.

Microsoft Corporation announced the availability of the Windows Azure platform at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC). The company also unveiled the next evolution of Microsoft Pinpoint, an online marketplace for Microsoft partners to market and sell their applications. The company introduced a new information service, Microsoft Codename 'Dallas,' also available through Pinpoint and built completely on the Windows Azure platform that enables developers and users to access premium commercial and reference datasets and content on any platform. Datasets currently available through 'Dallas' include those from the Associated Press, Citysearch, DATA.gov, ESRI, First American Corp., infoUSA.com Inc., NASA, National Geographic TOPO!, NAVTEQ, RiskMetrics Group, the United Nations, WaveMarket Inc. and Weather Central Inc. Starting Nov. 17, 2009, 'Dallas' is available as a limited community technology preview (CTP). The company also announced its plan to offer Windows Server virtual machine support on Windows Azure, enabling customers to more easily support virtualized infrastructure across the continuum of on-premises and cloud computing, and the release to manufacturing of Windows Identity Foundation, helping developers to provide more secure, simplified user access to both cloud and on-premises applications with open, identity-based claims. In addition, the company announced the new release of ASP.NET MVC2 beta, a free, fully supported framework that enables developers to rapidly build standards-based Web applications through rich asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) integration and enhanced extensibility.