Empower ISV Program

Frank Arrigo mentioned the Microsoft Empower Program today.  My company just recently applied (and just moments ago was accepted) to the Empower ISV Program.

It is a great place for startups and established ISVs to get partnered with Microsoft. From a startup’s perspective, it is very inexpensive and gives you a lot of tools that would otherwise occupy a good chunk of your budget (5 MSDN licenses are quite expensive). And for an established ISV (like us) it gives offers a painless path to a Microsoft partnership with no certification or testing requirements up front.

With Empower, we were able to partner with Microsoft during while migrating off our existing development environment rather than having to wait for our staff to pass certification tests or complete and test our .NET product line up front.