Visual Studio Industry Partner Program

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Microsoft offers a partner program for companies that sell tools and products that either integrate into or complement Microsoft’s developer offerings.  This program provides remarkable value.  If you are a company that produces a product (or products) for developers that either integrate with or extend Visual Studio you should sit up and take notice!  This includes all of you folks who produce development products for SharePoint.

Disclaimer - I have no personal vested interest in people joining this program.  The only reason I'm posting about this is that I think it's a great program that can really help the development community of SharePoint (and others).

There are basically two levels of participation – Alliance and Premier.

This program provides a plethora of benefits, including:

• Marketing benefits – gets your name and message in front of many thousands of developers.  This may be the most important benefit – it can translate into real sales and revenue for your company.
• Developer research data – every six months, Microsoft spends a great deal of money and time on market research on developers, and produces reports and statistics.  This data is fascinating.  You can see the number of developers using a particular technology in a given time period, and trends year-over-year, broken down by interesting segmentation of the developer market.  All participants in VSIPP get access to summaries of this data, with Premier members receiving more detail.  I’ve seen and used this data.  I have to say, my jaw dropped a bit when I heard this benefit.  You can use this data in very real ways to steer the direction of your products.
• Annual VSIP Summit and Developer Conference, and Developer Clinics – these are invitation-only events at the Microsoft campus in Redmond where you can get access to the people who really know the answers to your questions.
• MSDN Premium Subscription – this value of this benefit alone is greater than the cost of the Alliance level of participation.
• MSDN hosted web casts – this means that if you are a small company, and can’t afford the big pipes and servers necessary to host your web casts, you have a convenient solution, included in the price of this program.  Maintain your own web site, but link to the screen casts that are hosted on MSDN.
• Discounts on booths at various third party shows and advertising.
• For premier members of VSIPP, access to Visual Studio IDE source code.  If you develop Visual Studio Add-Ins, you can really make your products shine.

Yet this program is not very expensive - $3000 per year for the Alliance level, and $10,000 per year for the Premier level (3 year contract required).  The MSDN subscription alone recoups the cost.

This program is open to companies of all sizes – everything from Fortune 500 companies to three guys in a garage.  However, you must make a product for Microsoft platform developers – if you don’t, you can’t join.

I was in a meeting the other day where we were talking about SharePoint developers, and one of the managers of VSIPP presented some information about this program.  I had vaguely heard of this program, but had no idea about the level of value that it provides.  I felt that if I didn’t know about all of the benefits available, then I bet there are LOTS of others who don’t, and who should.

If your company sells to developers, and you are not part of this program, you are seriously missing out.  To learn more, go to http://www.msdn.com/vsip.