Aplana Software Inc., a Moscow-based software services company and a member of I.T.Co Group, has won the prestigious Microsoft ‘Smart Client Development Partner of the Year’ award for development of an online e-shop for digital music. This is the third Microsoft award received by Aplana, having previously won two similar awards in 2004.
Aplana Software received the award for the development of the digital music e-shop, developed in Windows Media Player 11; which enables pre-registered users to browse for songs or albums, then buy and download them on a real-time basis. Aplana’s developers introduced several different categories of customers: those who prefer to pay for each song separately, and those who prefer to subscribe for services on a monthly or yearly basis. Before making a purchase, all users are able listen to a full song and obtain information on the data output before making payment via credit card.
The award will be presented to Aplana at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) on 7-10 July – a premier annual event for industry partners, which will take place in Houston. This year’s award was competed for by many partner companies in Central and Eastern Europe, all of which demonstrated an innovative approach to solving business challenges, and creating new solutions based on Microsoft technologies.
“Aplana is very proud to win the ‘Microsoft Partner of the Year’ award for the second time. From year to year, the level of professionalism of companies participating in WPC becomes higher and higher, so to we need to increase our performances each year in order to win the award. Development of e-shops is a relatively new direction for our company, so victory in this competition gives us real inspiration to achieve new heights in this area.” says Victor Weinstein, CEO, Aplana Software Inc.
“This award proves Aplana’s ability to build new products using the very latest Microsoft technologies. This year we made good progress within the B2C digital media industry and now we can deliver complete e-commerce solutions including user-friendly interfaces built on Microsoft Silverlight(TM) as well as transaction processing engines built using Microsoft Commerce Server with full support of Microsoft DRM technologies”, says Anatoly Gaidai, CTO, Aplana Software Inc.