LONDON (Brand Republic) - Microsoft is launching a $200m (£137.1m) global advertising campaign to boost its position in the business software market.
The campaign, 鈥渟oftware agility鈥 created by McCann-Erickson, is the company鈥檚 largest to date. It will kick off today on US television and will be followed by print and poster ads.
The software giant has recently faced a decline in sales of its most profitable product, the desktop software suite Microsoft Office. In response, the company is pushing aggressively into the enterprise software market, dominated by rivals Oracle, Sun Microsystems and IBM. Microsoft estimates that the market is worth $90bn annually.
Microsoft has also come under pressure from the Unix-based operating system Linux, which has proved successful in rivalling Microsoft鈥檚 dominance with business-orientated operating system Windows NT.
Microsoft president and chief executive Steve Ballmer said, 鈥淏usinesses today need to be fast and nimble to compete and respond to customer needs, yet a lot of the technology for business is big, slow and expensive. We believe Microsoft offers a better and far more cost-effective solution.鈥
Microsoft鈥檚 enterprise offerings, which include SQL Server and Exchange Server, accounted for 20% of revenue in the last quarter, ending 31 December.
www.microsoft.com